This guide is intended to help anyone who wants to do a full NAND dump of a Nintendo Wii U. If you have used this guide and found something confusing, or have a request/recommendation to make it better please make a post and let me know.

Some background information. A full NAND dump of a Nintendo Wii U is also known as dumping or backing up the SLC & MLC. Therefore a full NAND Dump is the same as saying, dumping of the SLC & MLC and/or backup of the SLC & MLC. This should help with any confusion around the fact that these terms are used interchangeable and as you will see in the guide the recovery menu used to do this will specifically state "Dump SLC & MLC". For the sake of consistency I will be referring to this process throughout this guide as a backup of the SLC & MLC.

The hardware you will need in order to perform a backup of the SLC & MLC:

• 64GB or larger SD or Micro SD Card with SD Adapter
• Raspberry Pi Pico
• Micro USB Cable to plug the Pico into your computer & the Wii U
• SD Card reader or Micro SD Card to USB Adapter

The software you will need in order to perform a backup of the SLC & MLC:

• Wii U Recovery Menu
• UDPIH

I have linked to the software required. You must use the Wii U Recovery Menu in the link above. Do not use other releases of this Menu unless you already know they will work.

Follow the guide provided by GaryOderNichts for the UDPIH on the github page (link above). This will be loaded onto the Raspberry Pi Pico.

Format your 64GB SD Card as FAT32. If you are using Windows you will have to use a 3rd party tool to achieve this because Windows cannot format a drive above 32GB as FAT32. Once it is formatted download the file named "recovery_menu" from here, which is the wii u recovery menu. Place this in the root directory of the SD Card.

Eject the SD Card from the computer. You are done getting the software/hardware setup. You can now install the SD Card into the front of the Wii U. Grab your Micro USB cable and plug the Raspberry Pi Pico into it. Do not plug the other end into the Wii U yet. What you have to do is turn the Wii U on and wait for the Disc drive to stop spinning, Count to 3 (if 3 doesn't work try 2 or 1) and quickly plug in the USB Cable that is connected to the Raspberry Pi Pico. If the Wii U displays, you can also wait for the Wii U Logo screen to show and immediately plug in the Raspberry Pi Pico. If you do this correctly you will find yourself on the following screen:


Inside the recovery menu you control it by using the Eject & Power button on the front of the Wii U. Eject moves the cursor and the power button is used to select.

The very first option, which should automatically be highlighted, meaning its already selected is the "Dump SLC + MLC" function. This is what you want to use to make a backup of the SLC & MLC. Go ahead and push the Power Button to start the backup.

You should see the following screen for a few seconds while it unmounts the MLC so it can make a backup.


Immediately following that it will unmount the SLC and then it should start by, first backing up the SLC. This part of the backup is the shorter portion. It usually takes about 20-30 minutes. Do not be alarmed by the errors, as they are common using this method and can be ignored.


After the SLC backup completes it will star the backup for the MLC. Depending on the amount of corruption in the MLC this can take anywhere from 2-6 hours+. Sit back and let it work its magic.


Finally it will do one more SLC backup, this is normal because this method of backing up the SLC isn't that reliable so 2 backups are done in order to improve results. 


When the backup is done it will say "press EJECT or POWER to proceed..." at the bottom of the screen.


If you haven't already done so I recommend you push EJECT or POWER button to return to the previous menu and then go down and select "DUMP OTP + SEEPROM"


Hit the power button to backup OTP and SEEPROM. It will only take a few seconds. When its done it will look like this:


Congrats you have now done a full backup of the console. You can power the console off and make a copy of the files from the SD Card to your computer. DO NOT TURN THE CONSOLE BACK ON. OTHERWISE YOU WILL HAVE TO DO A FULL BACKUP OF SLC & MLC AGAIN. The files you need to copy are in the picture below:



You can now continue to installing a NAND-AID Guide.

The restore portion of the guide is below.

This sections covers restoring the backup to an SD Card to be used with a NAND-AID. You will need a computer with Windows 10 or Windows 11 to do this following this guide. This can also be accomplished on linux, however the guide doesn't cover that. 

After dumping the MLC, you end up with 15 parts. These parts need to be put back together into a single mlc.bin file. The following command run from command prompt in the directory where you have the 15 parts will do just that.

copy /b mlc.bin.part01 + mlc.bin.part02 + mlc.bin.part03 + mlc.bin.part04 + mlc.bin.part05 + mlc.bin.part06 + mlc.bin.part07 + mlc.bin.part08 + mlc.bin.part09 + mlc.bin.part10 + mlc.bin.part11 + mlc.bin.part12 + mlc.bin.part13 + mlc.bin.part14 + mlc.bin.part15 mlc.bin

You can put these anyplace on the computer. For simplicity I recommend the Desktop, and that is what this guide will be based on. For example, if we create a folder named "mlcparts" on the Desktop and we open a standard command prompt, it will start in the user directory, so we need to move it to  the mlcparts directory using command cd desktop/mlcparts.cd changes the working directory and desktop/mlcparts is the directory we want to be in.


NOTE: The user directory on your computer will will be different. It will be whatever name you are using for your Windows account. So if your name is John the user directory will be named John. This particular machine I am using to showcase this I just named public.

Now you can copy and past the following command into the command prompt:
copy /b mlc.bin.part01 + mlc.bin.part02 + mlc.bin.part03 + mlc.bin.part04 + mlc.bin.part05 + mlc.bin.part06 + mlc.bin.part07 + mlc.bin.part08 + mlc.bin.part09 + mlc.bin.part10 + mlc.bin.part11 + mlc.bin.part12 + mlc.bin.part13 + mlc.bin.part14 + mlc.bin.part15 mlc.bin
It should look like this:


Hit enter and it should start putting the 15 parts together into a single file. If working correctly it should look like this:


When it finishes it will look like this:


You should now have a file named "mlc.bin" inside the mlcparts folder.


This is the file that we need to write to an SD Card. You need to use a 32GB SD Card if your console is a 32GB console. Likewise if you are restoring an 8GB console, you need an 8GB SD Card. You can write the file to the SD Card on Windows using Etcher.

You can just download the portable version and open the exe file. Click "Flash from file" and browser to the directory where the mlc.bin is located and select it and click open.



Etcher will throw a warning about Missing partition table, you can hit continue and ignore this. Wii U file systems do not have the partition table that makes them bootable. 


Now select the target, this will be the SD card that you will have to insert into the computer. If you are following this guide you should have purchased a Micro SD Card to USB Adapter. Insert the SD Card into the adapter and plug it into a USB port. If you have a laptop with an SD Card Reader you can also use that. You want to make sure you select the SD Card, fortunately Etcher is smart and won't let you select system drives. Once you do that go ahead and hit Flash!

This process will take anywhere from 10-30 minutes depending on the system and the SD Card you are using. When it finishes it will let you know. You can eject the SD card and install it in your NAND-AID. 

Depending of the state the console is in, there are also 3 other ways to dump the NAND:

• the classic nanddumper, which is also bundled with Aroma
• Using minute (and format redNAND option, for the MLC)
• using a card reader and connect the eMMC to that. That's what the big pads on the NAND-AID are for

Minute is hardcoded for 32GB MLC.
The recovery reads through the scfm, so that MLC image is consitent without SCFM. All the other options just do a 1:1 image of the raw eMMC, so they still depend on the SCFM. But that is fine if you just write it to an SD and use it in place of the eMMC.

I have added the restore portion of the guide to this post.

Just a question before I even start attempting this, am I using the same micro SD card for the back up and for the NAND-AID?

Thanks for providing guides

Quote from: RollingBox on Sep 10, 2024, 05:59 PMJust a question before I even start attempting this, am I using the same micro SD card for the back up and for the NAND-AID?

Thanks for providing guides

No, you will need 2 Micro SD cards. 1 for the NAND-AID and the 2nd one plugs into the front of the Wii U and it used to launch the recovery menu, as well as used for the backups. 

I'm not getting all the options shown above?

Where did you download the recovery menu? I provided a link in my post to the version of the recovery menu I used in this guide. There are different versions of the recovery menu floating around with different options. I specifically used the one provided by Jan-Hofmeier

On the github it doesn't appear that there has been any updates. That being said I have attached the recovery menu to this post for direct download, just in case something has been changed. Cheers

That version of the recovery menu does provide the needed options, thank you. I was in the process of dumping MLC + SLC but my gamepad cut out on me despite being plugged in--hopefully that won't cause future problems. I will try again later tonight after the gamepad charges up and leave it go for the night to retry the dump.

I would use the TV or PC monitor but it refuses to provide a display on either device via HDMI cable.

Quote from: RollingBox on Sep 16, 2024, 06:28 PMThat version of the recovery menu does provide the needed options, thank you. I was in the process of dumping MLC + SLC but my gamepad cut out on me despite being plugged in--hopefully that won't cause future problems. I will try again later tonight after the gamepad charges up and leave it go for the night to retry the dump.

I would use the TV or PC monitor but it refuses to provide a display on either device via HDMI cable.

You can leave the gamepad on the docking station charging to prevent it from dying. As for future problems, interrupting the dump of the MLC/SLC won't harm anything.

Did you try using the Nintendo AV Cable with the Wii? I have had a few wii consoles that I needed to hook up this way to get a video to show up.