New Boot Exploit Resurrects Bricked Wii U Consoles from Recycled SD Cards; ‘Paid the Beak’ Exploit Released on GitHub

Sure thing, here we go…

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So, there’s this person, a console hacker—I know, those folks always on the edge of something wild—WinCurious is their name. They got their hands on a bunch of, well, let’s call it junk. Discarded SD cards, all from some Nintendo factory. Imagine that—the place where Wiis and Wii Us get their magic. DeadlyFoez (cool name, huh?) said they found a boot image on one card used for setting up the Wii U at the factory. Like, how do they even find this stuff?

Anyhow, the cards were a mess. Totally busted. Out of all those cards, 25% were just, like, dead to the world. But the rest? They just needed a bit of love—a solder here, a straighten there. Not that I’ve ever tried soldering. Seems like one of those things best left to the DeadlyFoez types.

Plugging these guys into a reader, though? Not that easy. Forget about copying and pasting like you’re moving holiday photos onto a laptop. DeadlyFoez mentioned needing this fancy external programmer, something that could tango with TSOP 48 chips—whatever those are. But guess what? Nope, no such gizmo on hand.

WinCurious, however, had this wild idea. Ever tried brain surgery on an SD card? Pretty much what they did. Swapping NAND chips onto functioning cards, like tiny tech Frankenstein. Not easy though; those TSOP 48 clips are apparently as frustrating as, I don’t know, folding a fitted sheet. The soldering pads are so tiny, you’d need a magnifying glass just to see what’s going down. Anyway—not to stray off—somehow, they managed. If that’s not persistence, I don’t know what is.

So, they salvaged 14 cards. Not a bad harvest from what looked like a tech graveyard. Then Rairii, another one in this merry band of hackers, found some kind of golden ticket: the SDBoot1 image. I mean, it’s like stumbling on a secret door in your own house. This thing could revive nearly any bricked Wii U. But, brace yourselves, you’ll need either a Nintendo jig, this cute little thing called a Raspberry Pi Pico, or maybe a PICAXE 08M2 microcontroller—say that three times fast.

Once you’ve got everything sorted—and really, if you can do this, hats off—you can run wild on your old console. You could even slap on a mod chip called de_Fuse if you’re feeling extra brave. Not that I recommend going full mad scientist unless that’s your thing.

And hey, while you’re at it, go follow Tom’s Hardware for more tech tinkering tales. Who knows what you might dig up next?

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There you have it!