Resetting / revirginizing your Wii to (almost) factory state

  1. WARNING: This will completely erase everything on your system.
  2. You’ll need giantpune’s wiiqt tools. It appears they’ve been abandoned for some time so I’ve cloned the code to https://github.com/trapexit/wiiqt just in case.
    For Windows: ohneschwanzenegger, nandExtract, nandBinCheck, giantpune-tools-dlls. On other platforms they’ll need to be built locally.
  3. Use BootMii [hackmii_installer_v1.2] to acquire an up to date version of your Wii’s nand.bin. We want to make sure that the bad block list is up to date.
  4. Using ohneschwanzenegger:
    1. Nand Dump > New nand…
    2. Click “Existing Nand…”
    3. Leave “Keys”, “Boot 1 & 2”, and “uid.sys” alone. (Set to “From old nand”)
    4. Click “OK”
    5. You should see: Set path to nand as PATH
      Created /shared2/test/testlog.txt
    6. Content > Format
      You are about to format PATH
      This cannot be undone. Are you sure you want to do it?
      Click “Yes” Formatting nand…
      Created /shared2/test/testlog.txt
      Done!
    7. Set the “Local Cache” directory to some temporary directory. ("/tmp", “c:\temp”, etc.)
    8. In the top text entry line enter “4.3U” or whichever OS version you wish to install.
    9. Click “Get It!”
    10. You’ll see lots of “Received a completed download from NUS” and matching* “Installed title XXXXXXXXXXXXXX vXXXXX to nand”* and finally “NUS object is done working”
    11. You’ll be presented with the same dialog box as when selecting Content > Setting.txt
      Probably should change the “Code” and “SerNo” to what’s on the bottom of your Wii.
      Click “OK”
    12. Content > Write meta entries
    13. Content > Flush
    14. Exit ohneschwanzenegger
  5. Place the nand.bin file you created with ohneschwanzenegger on the SD card’s root directory. (Overwriting the previously dumped file.)
  6. Boot the Wii into BootMii using the SD card and restore the nand
  7. If you expect to restore the nand in the future you may want to setup the Wii and then dump again.