Upgrading

[Link]

Well, I never thought I would have to ask you guys about it.

I have a friend in USA who basically mothed his Wii like over 1 year ago - it had 3.2U and now he wants to play Sonic Colors - original. However, believe it or not.. me and him FAIL to properly upgrade his Wii. And before you say: "Hey, you only need to install IOS56" - it does not work. We're puzzled. He can use the Twilight Hack, even bannerbomb does not work (even though it should, the "Load boot.dol/elf" screen appears but all homebrew black screens).

He is as far that he'd accept upgrading to 4.3 essentially losing the Homebrew Channel (he has an old one - 1.0.1 - upgrading also files, details follow).

What happened back then: He did install Starfall and WiiGator Backup Loader. Admittedly, I for myself also had Starfall and I never had troubles with it, all he basically did was blocking disc updates - by now Starfall features should be disabled though - Sonic Colors attempts to update the Wii but it fails (or well.. it hangs up - and yes I know upgrading from 3.x to 4.3 should take some time but he left on his Wii over night - 7 hours should be sufficient).

This morning (evening for him) I tried to help him out but admittedly.. I can sum up what was tried:
-using Waninkoko's 4.3 updater: we tried IOS249 (he probably has a very old cIOS) and IOS30 and IOS36 - it does something but ultimately fails installing.. nothing seems to be upgraded in the end
-installing HBC 1.0.8 including Bootmii as both boot2 and IOS - success! However.. for whatever reason he seems to have wrongly installed IOS61s and HBC attempts to use it and thus black screens.. we downgraded back to 1.0.1 as I do not have other installs ready unfortunately - Bootmii as boot2 however is installed and we succesfully dumped the complete flash - so we have a playground Wii, bricking the NAND is of no major issue we should be able to restore everything into the current state
-using WAD Managers to get legit IOS into the Wii: we managed to get a new IOS33 and 36 into the Wii (taken from Sonic Colors Update partition).. installing IOS61 (also Colors Update) or IOS58 (downloaded by me via NUS) failed.. using the IOS58 DOwnloader also failed, it downloaded but did not manage to install
-attempts to install IOS56 using Gecko OS by inserting the game and launching it - failed... it installed some content but most of it was not

Result by now: A Wii with several half-installed IOS files, which seems to be working but fails at updating - whether it is supposed to be upgrading - of course HBC installation of 1.0.8 also fails, we'd love to get HBPROT support however the HBC installer now attempts to use IOS58 for HBC - do you know if there is a way to force the Hackmii installer to use the IOS WE(!) decide (we know IOS35 and 36 for example work fine - I know HBC could not use USB 2.0 then but we wouldn't care - first of all we want to get the Wii updated).

Do you have tips on what I can try when we continue our upgrading plans.

Just as a prerequisite plan:
-I have no problems completely overwriting the System Menu WAD for example with 3.3 (an idea I had today) just to make sure Starfall is really removed - IOS30 seems to be running.. even if it fails, we have a Bootmii backup
-He has no intentions to continue using Backup loaders of any kind - in fact.. he only used WiiGator once
-CIOSCorp and stuff like that should not be installed
-as mentioned: BootMii backup is there.. so we're pretty okay with trashing the whole NAND content, just to get it to work!

His Wii is old - boot2v2 (so if we succesfully upgrade to 4.3 I am aware bootmii needs to be reinstalled) - a launch Wii basically.

[DR4G0N]

so he has acces to the old hbc ?
try pimpmywii 2.11 or modmii

pimpmywii: run through hbc, run diagnosis and fix problems
modmii: run on the pc, following on screen instructions, it's mostly recommended (even for hacked wii's) to select the virgin wii option


and if all else fails

comex nand formatter
grab desired system menu+region .wad and the ios it runs on as .wad
place on the root of the sd and run comex nand formatter

after update with a original wii disc to regain ios's
then hack the wii again and run pimpmywii2.11 to install missing/outdated ios's that maybe weren't on the disc

[Link]

modmii and pimpmywii did not work - they all failed to install IOS files.

In the end.. I also planned the NAND formatter is the last option and it came to it. We used the formatter, kept the settings and installed a blank 4.1U - then we simply allowed Sonic Colors to run its update and then the Wii was 4.3U - followed by an online update - yes, Bootmii was away again but we could simply reinstall it using Stack Smash - the Wii is up to date and can essentially do everything a Wii should do again. And it has Bootmii and HBC - perfect! (Yes, it has no cIOS and all IOS are trucha protected but well.. he does not need any loaders other than Gecko OS for discs - channels are not of an issue yet)