Topic: Wii to Wii Memory Swap.

OK I have two Wii's in my household. My first Wii broke and some memory can't be saved on to an SD card (The Conduit). What do i need to swap and how in order to transfer the data from Wii A to Wii B? Please help I have the two Wii's open and ready for surgery.

P.S. Please post a picture or video on what exactly i need to swap.

You might want to delete the duplicate thread, I see two of these.

Anyhow, I wouldn't take the hardware route myself. Is that other Wii completely broken and won't turn on at all? If you can still get to the Wii menu, you could install the homebrew channel and use that to dump an image of the entire internal filesystem, then restore it on the new Wii. Downloaded games and whatnot won't work on the new system no matter what you do, of course, so if you have those you'd best contact Nintendo about a transfer. But saved games, even those that are locked from copying, should be transferable by the homebrew process.

I guess if the old system doesn't even turn on, and if you can't go through Nintendo, you can try to physically swap something, but that seems very risky, and it's not a normal internal hard drive, it's just some sort of internal flash memory that may not be easily removable.

The problem was it wouldn't read disc's. It made a really loud noise, sounded like my disc's were being scratched, so I, like an idiot, went to Youtube and started tampering with the insides of my Wii. That only made things worse. Now the disc's won't even spin, it just spits them out after a few secs. Other then that my Wii works. How do I install the Homebrew Channel?

Oh and I Duplicated the thread because i figured I'll get more views here. I'll delete the other one now.

The memory is the samsung chip on the back of the motherboard
Here's video with a image of it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kihXP9WYhLc

If you want to take it out and swap it you'll need a soldering iron but this would be hard to do and you'll probably end up damaging the wii if you are not good at soldering.

Yeah you're right Dragon Warrior. I'd probably murder my Wii. But warioswoods said there may be hope if i download the Homebrew Channel. But I need a tutorial on all that too. To begin, how do I install the Homebrew Channel?

It's a little complicated, but actually simpler than it used to be (no more Twilight Princess required) thanks to the remarkable progress of the hackers. Anyhow, to install the Homebrew Channel, you'll need:

• an SD card
• the HackMii installer
• Bannerbomb in order to launch that installer

It looks like you'll need to use BootMii to do the backup and restore, and I've never really played with BootMii itself before, so I don't know what the process looks like. However, it seems like the best way by far for you to dump a perfect image of the old Wii onto your SD card, then restore it on the new system.

I might go through the steps of the backup procedure myself soon using BootMii (since I recently got an alarming "Wii System Files Corrupt" message once that made me think a backup is a good idea), and if I do, I can describe the process in a little more detail.

warioswoods, you are a life saver. If all this works I will write "warioswoods is the best!" on my Signature lolz. Can I save my Wii Speak Channel?

Hmm, that's a good question, I don't have WiiSpeak, but I'm guessing you got it via a download ticket bundled with the hardware? If I remember correctly, Nintendo will give out a new download ticket if you call them and just say that you bought the Wii Speak used from someone else; I'm pretty sure I saw someone saying that, but I could be wrong.

Now, any games you downloaded from VC or WiiWare, though, can't transfer as far as I know, so I don't know if you have any of those.

I should also just note that I don't know exactly what can and cannot be moved in general -- for instance, your new Wii will certainly have a new friend code, so if you're trying to keep online stats or whatever in the Conduit, the game might not recognize that properly on the new system where you're essentially a different user online. But maybe someone else can weigh in on that, I've never tried moving a saved game that involves online multiplayer.

I have to ask: why didn't you send it to Nintendo in the first place? Even if you wanted to do your own repair, if the optical drive was the problem you can buy those easily enough online without having to buy a whole new Wii. In fact why not just swap out the optical drive with the new Wii you've purchased and then return that one? Even if they wouldn't take it stating you've tampered with it (when I opened mine I don't recall seeing any stickers or anything that would indicate that -- Nintendo certainly didn't care when I sent it in for a non-warranty repair) you could still get it fixed and then sell it or just buy an optical drive and do the same.

Of course now that you have two you could use one as a homebrew system and try converting it to be a Japanese system or similar...if you're willing to risk bricking it, that is!

@Sean Aaron

That's kind of an interesting idea... I never thought about it, but I should look and see if anyone is selling a "broken" Wii on ebay or elsewhere, that won't play retail games but still goes to the menu. If I could find one for a good price, I'd certainly go ahead and set it up for the JP region in order to finally try out some of their downloadable titles. I've researched the current homebrew capabilities on this topic, and it seems like it's very much possible to change your region using only soft-mods and then successfully purchase from the Japanese Shop Channel. (I saw someone that couldn't change theirs back to the US region after switching, and who was locked to the JP shop from that point forward even after changing the system region back, but that wouldn't bother me either if it's just a disc-less Wii I use only for that purpose).