Question about "virginizing" Wii

Hi everybody, thanks so much in advance for your time,

This might be a bit of a long-winded question, but I just want to explain in as much detail as I possibly can about what I did and to see if I went about the best way of doing it.

A few years ago I had softmodded my 4.3U Wii so I could inject a few VC games through WAD Manager. I did this because I had just bought a new Wii, as my old one had passed on and I lost quite a few virtual console games that I had accumulated on it over the years. If I recall correctly, I had originally just installed the HBC and BootMii via Letterbomb (since I believe it was the only way to do it on System Menu 4.3U), and then installed the WAD Manager and a few VC WADs on to my system.

Fast forward to a few days ago. I recently decided I wanted to make my Wii as "factory new" as possible - I don't plan on selling it or sending it to Nintendo or anything, I just did this to lift a weight off my own conscience. I had originally thought this would be a fairly simple task, but I ended up spending the next day or so painstakingly relearning what I knew about Wii Homebrew and finding the best method I could to "virginize" my system.

Sooo... I started out by deleting all unofficial channels (except the HBC itself). All of them were just virtual console games I had injected with the WAD Manager. In hindsight, I probably should have used AnyTitle Deleter to do this job to completely remove any traces, but I'm hoping I solved that problem later (I'll explain below). After that came actually trying to get rid of as much Homebrew as possible.

I started out by uninstalling BootMii through launching the Hackmii Installer with Letterbomb. After that came deleting all the unoffical IOSes and whatnot, which I was not exactly sure of how to go about. I had read that updating your Wii to system menu 4.3 deleted all unofficial IOSes, so I figured this was my best bet without using a NAND formatter. Problem was, I was already on version 4.3, so there was no way I could update. To work around this, I installed DOPMii and followed a YouTube guide to downgrade my system to 4.1. After this was complete, I decided it was safe to bid farewell to the Homebrew Channel, and deleted it and it's contents via the data management on the Wii Menu. Finally, I (hopefully) removed all unofficial mods by updating the 4.1 system menu I had downgraded to with ModMii by installing the official Nintendo update and upgrading to 4.3.

After all that, I was pretty sure I had done all I could. I did run across one problem, as to celebrate completing this endeavor I decided to legitmately buy a game from the Wii Shop Channel that I had previously injected into the system with WAD Manager. Of course, when I tried to download the game, I got Error Code: 204036. I did a quick search on it and found it had to do with me previously installing the game I was now trying to buy and download with the WAD manager. Apparently deleting it through the Wii data management had still left traces of the "unofficial" game I had injected via the WAD Manager. I found out that formatting fixed the issue, so I did that, and I was able to download the game (after getting error code 204038, but that only indicated a connection problem apparently, which was relieving).

Anyway, here I am now, after going through the long journey to hopefully make my Wii as clean/virgin-like as possible. So all in all, I just wanted to maybe ask a few experts (since I am honestly a newbie at Wii modding, which is why I'm glad I'm done with it) if these methods I went through would have successfully cleaned my Wii. Would downgrading from 4.3 to 4.1 back to 4.3 again to have Nintendo's official patch delete any remnants of mods have worked? Did formatting the system remove ALL traces of past unoffical channels and/or WADs? I'd so immensely appreciate any insight to put my mind at ease.

I'm so very sorry for the long question, and if this is a stupid thing to ask, but I really just wanted the peace of mind. Again, any help/insight I get will be greatly appreciated!

Many thanks in advance!

The short answer is no, unless you have a clean backup of the NAND from before you started installing crap there is no way to remove all traces.

Hi there, thanks for the reply.

I'm aware there will always be traces of modding on the console that are (nearly?) impossible to remove - I'm fine with that. I'm just more worried about having any active modifications on my console (mostly cIOSes and WADs, things that are hard to remove otherwise). So as long as ALL mods, traceable or otherwise, are deleted or overwritten and no longer present on the console, I'm perfectly happy with that - but would a Nintendo Update in the method I used have deleted all those?

Again, thanks for the help.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 02/13/2015 02:36PM by Vlaqorvik.

No, because it sounds like you only downgraded the system menu (which is very dangerous and a good way to get a brick). The system update only overwrites things that are out of date so any CIOSes wouldn't have been touched.

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tueidj
No, because it sounds like you only downgraded the system menu.

Sorry if I'm reading your post wrong, but just in case, after I downgraded the system menu back to 4.1 (using this method) , I did an official Nintendo Update from the System Settings back to 4.3. From what it sounds like, you're saying that I only downgraded the system menu, but didn't really do anything else, thus making my update to 4.3 afterwards not have anything to overwrite? I was under the impression from reading various other questions that were similar enough to mine that updating to 4.3 deleted/overwrote all cIOSes and mods. I guess this was incorrect though? Sorry, I'm a little confused. Regardless, I appreciate your help.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 02/14/2015 05:14AM by Vlaqorvik.