3DS Cartridge Fixer Tool
Lately, there have been news about NAND Flash media deteriorating just because of sitting unused in storage for too long. 3DS Cartridges use a fancy NAND Flash chip, so, naturally, there is some cause for concern that they, too, will start failing.
When cleaning my collection, I decided to check all my 3DS games for this very reason - and to my surprise, my Paper Jam Bros. cartridge has completely failed. On an unhacked 3DS, it would load infinitely, and on 3DSes with Luma CFW it would immediately throw an ARM 11 Exception when launched.
After dumping the game, I discovered that the ExeFS and about half of the game files were corrupted. I nearly wrote the cartridge off, until I noticed that the "infinite load" thing stopped happening. Indeed, the game was now crashing when trying to display the titlescreen. Checking with GodMode9, the ExeFS has seemingly fixed itself! Some more faffing later, I even managed to get the titlescreen to work again intermittently.
When cleaning my collection, I decided to check all my 3DS games for this very reason - and to my surprise, my Paper Jam Bros. cartridge has completely failed. On an unhacked 3DS, it would load infinitely, and on 3DSes with Luma CFW it would immediately throw an ARM 11 Exception when launched.
After dumping the game, I discovered that the ExeFS and about half of the game files were corrupted. I nearly wrote the cartridge off, until I noticed that the "infinite load" thing stopped happening. Indeed, the game was now crashing when trying to display the titlescreen. Checking with GodMode9, the ExeFS has seemingly fixed itself! Some more faffing later, I even managed to get the titlescreen to work again intermittently.
Reading around, I found
thispost, and with it mentions of the 3DS carts' refresh functionality. And so, I modified GodMode9 to run this refresh more frequently and after some manual checking and comparing hashes, I now have a fully working Paper Jam. Bros. cartridge again. Hooray?
I decided to make the process more automatic and release a tool able to potentially fix cartridges corrupted in this same manner.
I decided to make the process more automatic and release a tool able to potentially fix cartridges corrupted in this same manner.
Download:
https://github.com/skawo/GodMode9-with-Cartridge-Fixer
(In the "releases" section)
Usage:
- Run the program (Install the Luma CFW, put the compiled .firm file from the Releases section in luma/payloads/, turn on the 3DS holding START) and insert a cartridge.
- Choose "GAMECART". A list of files will pop up. If it doesn't, try reinserting the cartridge.
- Choose the file with the .3ds extension (but NOT .trim.3ds, just .3ds).
- Choose "NCSD image options..."
- Choose "Fix cartridge corruption".
- After the fixer finishes, go into "NCSD image options" again and choose "Verify".
- If the verify option says that verification succeded, great! You're done.
If the verification fails, try running the fixer process again. It may take several run-throughs before the whole cart is stabilized. To verify that the cart is getting better with each-run through, hold Y while selecting the "Fix cartridge corruption" option. This will make the console output a log of bad blocks to the SD card (to the gm9/out folder). If that list keeps getting shorter with each run-through, great! Keep going. if the number of entries doesn't decrease after a 2-3 attempts, then those blocks are probably not going to get better with repeated runs.
If you're looking for a way to confirm your cartridges are working fine, GodMode9 (and as an extension, this tool as well) has a verify function which checks all the files - a more thorough check than just trying the cartridge out regularly. A cartridge might start but still have some random files corrupted.
Stats so far:
34 fixed fully - - - - - - - - 17 fixed partially - - - - - - - - 19 unrecoverable
If you do try this out, please share the results!
34 fixed fully - - - - - - - - 17 fixed partially - - - - - - - - 19 unrecoverable
If you do try this out, please share the results!
Note: this will not do anything for cartridges that have physical defects, such as cracked solder joints. But if your cartridge appears to load infinitely, or frequently crashes from non-gameplay-related reasons, this tool has a chance to fix it.
