Just recently softmodded my wii! Thank you forum!

[giraffe42]

Hi everyone, just want to thank everyone for the forum and all the great information contained here.
I already had my Wii at 4.2U and followed the "Full hacking guide to softmodding 4.2 system menu" to the letter and it worked great. Spent a day checking out all the homebrew channel stuff before diving into backups. Tried Ghostbusters and Drawn to Life on DVD+R because that's all I had that evening.
It worked fine after I flashed my NEC DVDRW with the firmware to enable it to do bitsetting and set the book type to DVD-ROM. The very next day I got some Staples brand DVD-Rs and did notice that there was a whole lot less noise from the head's movement coming from the wii. I also tried World Of Zoo and Rayman Raving Rabbids and both worked fine. Then I got Metroid Trilogy and when I tried playing Metroid Prime 2 it just terminated back to system menu. After that I tried NSMB and kept getting the green screen. As per messie's guide I followed steps 1-3 from ShadowSonic2's "Get cIOS on 4.2 Wii" and it still would not work no matter what settings I set in Neogamma R7. Then I did step 5 from ShadowSonic2's guide and that still didn't work.

After that I searched around and was reading for a while and then performed more steps from some threads I cannot find now. It mostly has to do with installing IOS249 for Neogamma and then patching IOS53,55 and 57 or 59. After that NSMB still didn't work and I gave up for the day.

Today I got ahold of a Hitachi 2.5" 40GB IDE HD and a USB adapter and it worked wonderfully with my Wii, but not before I had to delete the utility partition put there by Dell. The trick with that was that it won't let you delete it through disk management where it would show as "EISA Configuration". To delete it I found a guide here.
Formatted the drive and loaded the ISOs to the HD using WBFS Manager and Ghostbusters worked just fine.
Then I tried following davepm's directions to make NSMB work but after I loaded the ISO in WiiScrubber I got an error and was not even able to view the files, let alone replace them. I gave in and just tried it with Forced Video to Wii and also Patch Country Str. and it loaded the game. I have not had a chance to actually play it yet and see how long it goes on for but when I do I will certainly report it in the related thread!

Want to say thanks again for the forum and for all the effort that went in to developing a chip-free solution for modding a Wii.

[WiiJohn]

Sounds like you have got on famously, all credit to you seeing as you only just started.
Here are a few links you might find useful.

Hi and welcome to WiiHacks

If you need advice or help for anything Wii related you have joined the right site, whether its hard or soft modded.

Don’t be shy, ask if you are stuck, just don’t expect other people to do all the work for you.

Before you start anything, make sure you read the rules go over the tutorials, and most importantly, search before asking questions.

Make sure you post in the correct areas of the forums.

If you are starting from scratch, new 3.1-4.1 written by Dogeggs

If you already have Homebrew, upgrade to 4.1 written by Dogeggs

If you want or are already on 4.2, complete 4.2 guide written by Messie

I hope you have a great time here at WiiHacks, and increase your knowledge of all things Wii.

[giraffe42]

Thank you. I can't say I'm a newbie in hacking things and changing the firmware - have quite a bit of experience with certain Linksys routers and various cell phones, samsungs mostly though. I do have some basic knowledge when it comes to these and a general hunch on what too look for when things are going wrong and the signs are subltle. I am definitely a n00b when it comes to Wii though. I'm glad that I was able to find a great resource of this this forum and already picked up a lot and learned about the inner workings of the Wii.

Update: in NSMB I am up to the 1st castle and no problems yet!

[sjf]

it freezes for me right after the swimming level just beyond first castle... coin battles all play...