Wii NAND Ghost Pack (RealWnP) ask for beta tester

Email me pcfree2004@gmail.com if you want to beta-test it.

RealWnP 0.5 private beta – A Wii NAND Ghost Pack, provides fast Wii NAND on concole backup/restore. The functionality to Wii NAND is similar with PC Ghost utility to hard drive. With smaller packed image file, you can manage more NAND images of different region setting, firmware version or others in a single SD/SDHC card. With 160 seconds backup/verification time and 100 seconds analysis/restore/verification time, you can quickly switch between the above different configurations.

RealWnP Introduction

== WARNING ==
THIS PROGRAM IS FOR BETA TESTERS ONLY. THE BETA TESTERS SHOULD HAVE BOOTMII INSTALLED AS BOOT2 AND ALREADY BACKUP THEIR NAND BY BOOTMII.

This program pack comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. It is a HIGHLY DANGEROUS program that may brick your Wii. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK. However, if you have BootMii/boot2 installed and NAND.BIN backup by BootMii, you are safe to try this program.

== Introduction ==
RealWnP is a Wii NAND backup/restore utilities pack including RealWnR, RealWnW and other Win32 command line supplementary tools. The functionality to Wii NAND is something similar with Ghost (a hard drive backup/restore utility) in PC.

These tools use a new packed image format to save SD card space. Therefore you can easily manage several NAND packed image sets and restore a selected past state to your Wii console.

== Utilities ==
* RealWnR backups your Wii NAND to a packed image set with date/time as Pack Name. This is a brick free process.
* RealWnW selects a packed image set from SD and restore it to your Wii NAND console. Please note that direct NAND writing/programming is a TOP ONE HIGH RISK operation to your Wii. In the beta stage, it is strongly recommended you have BootMii/boot2 installed with NAND.BIN backup.
* NI2NP.exe is a Win32 command line tool to convert your old NAND Image to NAND packed image set with date/time as Pack Name or user-defined Pack Name. The pack image set should be manually copied to RealWnS directory in SD card for using by RealWnW. The old NAND image may come from +ECC dump of RealWnD, YaWnD, WiiND or even NAND.BIN from BootMii.
* LoadIOS.exe is a Win32 command line tool to patch boot.dol of RealWnR/RealWnW with specific IOS to reload. Patch dol with IOS 0 means using default IOS assigned by loader.

== LU64+ (3.4v2) and IOS ==
These tools rely on IOS to directly access Wii NAND. New IOSes that comes with System Menu 3.4 and later block IOS_Open for /dev/flash to block direct NAND access. I cannot provide direct hack information on how to patch these new IOSes. But you may enquire other IOS hacker about it. It would be a simple work for those who are familiar with ARM code disassemble and IOS patching.

== Performance ==
On my own test, RealWnR took 90 seconds to dump image and 75 seconds to verify it. And RealWnW tooks 48 seconds for analysis, 31 seconds to restore NAND and 22 seconds to verify it. Totally about 100 seconds for RealWnW to restore a image. The packed image set occupies about half size of normal NAND dump. So you may benefit from this pack by faster backup/restore and saving more image sets in one SD card.

== Format of Packed Image Set ==
All of the packed image sets are stored in RealWnS directory of SD card. The image sets are distinguished by filename as PackName prefixed with NP. That is, if a packed image header file are named as “NP3.2U_Backup.bin”, then “3.2U_Backup” is the PackName. The RealWnR always generates date/time code as PackName. The Win32 NI2NP.exe may generate date/time or user-defined PackName.

For each packed image set, you will have one header file with “.bin” extension and several data content files with “.00”, “.01” … extension. The header file consists of 512 bytes header and 8 boot blocks + 32 SFFS meta blocks. All other file data are packed in data content files.

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I'll beta test for you, once I get my Wii fixed.