Brick Prevention

I have 4.0E update and chip.

Been reading through these forums but I can only get vague ideas on how to prevent my Wii from getting bricked or in the case I do get bricked what program I should have installed to do a system restore.

1. Is there a program that takes a factory image backup of your Wii which can be booted b4 NAND?

2. What does preloader do? From what I have read it's main purpose is just booting HBC.

3. Why will my Wii brick in the first place what things could I have done to cause it.

There should be a permanent post here outlining this for dummies like me.

1. Not that I know of.
2. Preloader is a executable that slots just before the system menu executable that helps protect against "banner bricks"
3. There are 4 kinds of bricks:
Banner Bricks: the most common kind. caused by installing bad channels or region changing Korean wiis
Semi Brick: caused by installing the wrong region of menu without changing the region settings. Stops access to settings or duplicated channels
Full Brick: same causes as above, but gives opera style error screen on boot
Low Level Brick: caused by messing about by things you don't understand!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/23/2009 07:17PM by metroid_maniac.

Preloader does more than just offer a shortcut to the HBC and add brick protection (depending on the exact nature of the brick, it can recover from up to a semi brick, btw). It also has the ability to apply various system menu hacks to supress disc updates, enable region free, supress the healthscreen, autoboot a disc, and some other stuff that I can't recall off-hand. I consider this an essential item to have installed if you're going to be messing around with your Wii beyond just playing homebrew games through the HBC.

It can also load any dol on the root of your SD card, either on-demand, or automatically.

Quote
bg4m3r

It can also load any dol on the root of your SD card, either on-demand, or automatically.

can't preloader do that too with a certain hack.ini file?


BTW, what happened to your post count? You had a LOT more than 61

Quote
DrLucky
can't preloader do that too with a certain hack.ini file?
BTW, what happened to your post count? You had a LOT more than 61

hacks.ini has nothing to do with startup dol loading...it's simply a function of preloader, which is what I was referring to. :)
As for my post count, I have no idea...I never pay any attention to that! :P

preloader can't fix some semi bricks, not the most common (caused by out of region updates)