Under certain circumstances, HBC will show a scam warning screen and stop working. But it won't really: it lets you proceeed after one hour. Similarly, even in "crashy mode", you can get an app loaded some of the time.
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Basically we *hate hate hate* bricks. All of this protection is *also* to ensure the system is in a sane state for installation, so we know it'll work. We do many sanity checks too, *much* more paranoid than Nintendo's update code. We *never* want to be responsible for a brick.
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Switching gears, the BootMii boot2 update code contains a functional (not line-by-line) duplication of Nintendo's boot1 loader code, that it uses to confirm the exact layout and state of the existing boot2 installed on the Wii.pic.twitter.com/pUg93gyVwH
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We validate that the NAND has two valid, clean, working, hashed-OK, known version copies of boot2. Then we patch BootMii in (in RAM) and hash-check. We run write tests on empty boot2 blocks to ensure they are usable. Only then do we commit and write BootMii to empty blocks.pic.twitter.com/zhcU0L6uBT
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The installer is designed to use unused NAND blocks for the install, and, as the last step, writes a newer-generation blockmap that marks the original boot2 blocks as bad. Thus, there is zero failure window (you can power off at any time), and uninstallation = erasing blocks.pic.twitter.com/zbAI1zgivu
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Nintendo's boot2 update code is so terribad it writes the new bootloader before even verifying its signature (and leaves it clobbered if the sigcheck fails). Combined with a plaintext HTTP CDN, that leaves the TCP checksum as the only thing preventing a corrupted first copy.
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And since shit happens and the second copy could become corrupted, this is how Nintendo managed to brick a good fraction of Wiis, hacked or not, when they pushed a dummy version bump of boot2 as an attempt at uninstalling BootMii.
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To my knowledge, we have never bricked a Wii. Ever. With over 6 million users. The closest we came, there was a bug in the boot2 code with bad block handling. Since we'd checked that there was a working second copy, the person who hit it could still boot.
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Subsequent runs of the installer detected the bad state and refused to do anything. So we got a bug report, and no consoles were harmed.
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Replying to @marcan42
would love a blog write up in this topic of this awesome thread :)
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Replying to @officialjunk
Who writes blogposts these days? Tweetstorms are where it's at!
8:46 AM - 19 Jan 2018
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