Exploit for Reviving Bricked Wii U Consoles Discovered from Recovered Factory SD Cards: ‘Paid the Beak’ Now on GitHub

Oh, wow. So, there’s this console hacker – goes by WinCurious, right? – who somehow laid hands on these old, banged-up SD cards from a Nintendo factory. Apparently, they were part of the setup for Wii and Wii U systems. DeadlyFoez – seriously, who comes up with these names? – found out the cards had this boot image used for setting up the Wii U. They scraped some data off these damaged cards, which led to uncovering a neat trick for reviving software-bricked Wii U consoles. A nice score if you ask me.

But yeah, not everything was golden. About a quarter of these cards were beyond repair – trashed, like, forget about it. The rest were more like “eh, maybe we can do something here.” Some needed a bit of TLC, you know, resoldering work, or just a nudge to straighten them out. Once they got them sorted, they had to check the data. And nope, no simply plugging them into your PC with a little hope and a USB reader.

They had a glitch, though. DeadlyFoez didn’t have the right gear to read this NAND flash memory directly. And let’s face it, sometimes tech can be a pain. If it wasn’t for WinCurious having this idea – like, why not transplant the NAND chip to a donor SD card? You’d think swapping chips is kinda like swapping faces in one of those cheesy sci-fi movies. Somehow, it worked, and they managed to pull off reading the data. But hey, no one said soldering a TSOP 48 clip was easy. Those little guys melt at rather inconveniently low temps, and it’s like trying to spot a fly in a bowl of pepper.

Somehow, they got it done. They saved 14 cards, which is more than I can say for my last birthday cake attempt. Anyway, Rairii, another team member, stumbled upon an SDBoot1 image. Fancy term for something they could use to boss around the console’s boot process. They dubbed this trick “paid the beak” and tossed it up on GitHub for anyone feeling adventurous.

Now, the cool part? This whole setup lets you fix almost any bricked Wii U that doesn’t physically implode first. You do need this rare Nintendo jig, or maybe a Raspberry Pi Pico, or some microcontroller gadget. It’s like opening a can of worms, but way more fun. Throw your own stuff on the SD card, and let the Wii U magic happen.

If you’re feeling spiffy, there’s another mod, de_Fuse, which can tackle more intense failures but good luck with that unless you moonlight as a soldering savant.

So, what now? Well, stop staring at this text and maybe go follow Tom’s Hardware on Google News. They’ve got the goods if you enjoy this kind of tech detective work.