Accessing NAND through JTAG?

Hi folks,

I am a computer forensics student in the early planning stages of my Masters project which is looking at forensic analysis of the Wii. Obviously the Wii doesn't have a removable hard disk, so dumping the NAND flash is pretty much the only way of getting at the data outside of doing a live investigation. My background is primarily in software, but my project supervisor has a lot of hardware experience and suggested that it may be possible to read the NAND through a JTAG connection and dump the output to a PC (or SD card, or... somewhere). Before we can go anywhere with this idea though we need to determine whether or not the Wii actually has these connections! My apologies if this is a painfully obvious question, but a good amount of googling didn't turn up a clear answer and it's going to be a couple of weeks before we get our hands on a spare Wii.

Does the Wii have a JTAG port (or the connections to support one)?

Any information is appreciated,

Peter

The Wii has no JTAG port that I know of. However, you can use BootMii to dump most of, if not all of, the NAND. The part that may not be dumped is the second-stage bootloader, which is insignificant.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/17/2010 03:20AM by WikiFSX.

Thanks for the quick reply. It's not quite what I wanted to hear, but I guessed as much from the lack of references to JTAG on the forum/wiki. If it existed, someone would have tried using it by now, right?

Thanks for the BootMii suggestion. I've been reading the HackMii blog and all looks like software is the way forward. My project is still in the very early stages. I've started keeping a project blog, but if I find anything new or interesting I'll try and post it around here somewhere too.

we're pretty sure that there are no JTAG testpoints available on the Wii's mainboard. Keep in mind that they don't want you to read out the NAND easily.