Official Wiikey Fusion to GC MOD troubleshooting thread!

[nuke]

01

 

[ShockSlayer]

It says that? On the mobo? I don't even.

SS

 

[nuke]

Ok, this is getting really weird. Now sometimes when I boot it up it freezes, and I have to keep trying to boot it up until it goes to the menu. Also I still get the error and insert disc or whatever. I have a video if anyone wants it.

 

[weedenfeed]

So I got my WiiKey Fusion all wired up to my Gamecube last night, but when i turned it on, an error would come up randomly that basically said "There's an error. Turn off the system and look at your instruction guide" or something like that. Even when the error didn't come up, it wasn't recognizing the wiikey.

So I got out my multimeter and started double-checking continuity on everything and I found two problems.

1. For some reason, when i touch my two leads on ground and then on 5V, I get random quick little beeps. I'm thinking i must have a bridge somewhere, but all my solder points seem to look sound. What's the best way to check them?

2. My ribbon cable from the wiikey into the 36pin adapter never seems like it goes in far enough, and when i try to test continuity from the ribbon cable to the adapter, i cant ever get a beep. When i check from one end of the ribbon cable to the other end of the ribbon cable, it beeps just fine. Shouldn't i get a continuity beep once the two chips are hooked up together? Do I have a bad adapter? Or could my Ground/5V issue be causing that problem as well?

Any help is greatly appreciated. I'm going to try to hook my WiiKey up to my Wii as well just to make sure I dont have a dead WiiKey.

Thanks!!!

-Weedenfeed

 

[Ashen]

1. Are you talking about on the GC motherboard? If you get a quick beep between the 5v points for the DD and ground this is normal. A digital mutimeter in continuity mode will also check resistance. If you were to get a steady continuous "streaming beep" from your multimeter it would mean you had a bridge somewhere. Most likely if that was the case the GC would not even turn on.

2. you should get continuity from the end of the FFC to the solder points of your adapter. If you're not getting this then that is your problem. Readjust your FFC in the Adapter socket until you get continuity on all pins (steady continuous "streaming beep" from your multimeter).

Checking your wiikey on a Wii at this point is a really good idea. Best to make sure you haven't killed it before we try to troubleshoot further.

 

[SonyQrio]

For some reason, when i touch my two leads on ground and then on 5V, I get random quick little beeps.

Sigh. Your multimeter sends out a small voltage to do continuity. When you touch one lead on 5v, and the other on ground, you are sending a small voltage through the CPU, regulators, resistors, diodes, capacitors, and the GPU before it gets back to your other lead. It is very, very bad to send foreign voltages through any solid state component, and can fry your Game Cube (or whatever else you are working on).

I was carefully testing continuity on my board when I accidentally touched the wrong lead. When I turned my GC on, there was interference on the screen and my controller didn't work. I had to let it sit overnight before it started working again.

Moral of the story, DON'T EVER USE CONTINUITY ON COMPLEX MOTHERBOARDS.

I just don't want you to fry your mobo.

Good luck,
SQ

 

[Tchay]

My wiikey fusion keeps giving an error on the startup menu. It will say something like "Gamecube cannot read disc....blah blah blah". The switch works fine, when I push the detection switch, it will say "reading disc" like it should, but then go to that error.

My wiikey was fine a few weeks ago, but I took a 2 week break, started it up again and had this problem. The only thing I changed was adding 3 volt regulators.

I've been checking all the connections for the past few days and everything still appears fine. The blue light comes on, but doesn't flicker before turning off (like it normally would). The wiikey is fine since it happens on my other wiikey that works as well.

I will keep checking everything, but maybe someone knows what might be the issue. I feel like some wire is out of place. I did pop off a few and solder them back on, so its possible I flip flopped some of them....

 

[SonyQrio]

The same thing happened is happening to me, TChay. I thought it was the ribbon cable, but I replaced it and it's not. I actually think that it is because of the connector being loose inside the NHD breakout board. Oh well. Master Ashen, what's happening?

 

[weedenfeed]

I got my WiiKey working with my gamecube finally, but when I went to apply the 1.5 update, the system froze up and now my WiiKey isn't loading. I downloaded the recovery ISO from wiikey's website, but when i try to follow their instructions from my Terminal program on my Mac, it doesn't work. I keep getting the error dd bs: illegal numeric value. Can someone help me?

And just FYI, instead of the usual blue light on the WiiKey, i'm now getting the red light.

EDIT: My light is actually blue, the ribbon cable wasn't seated properly. Everything is working as far as i can tell, and all wires are hooked up properly, but since the wiikey never finished updating, it now has a bad flash and won't start up.

Here's the restore ISO's instructions that are messing me up:

1) From the command line, identify your SD card device by typing:

MaxOSX: `diskutil list'
(use the device name without a partition number;
ie: '/dev/disk1' and not '/dev/disk1s1')
(this works fine)

2) Once you are sure which device is your SD card, you can type the following command:

MAC OSX, with /dev/disk1 as your device:
dd if=wkf_recover_1_2.iso of=/dev/disk1 bs=1M
(this doesn't work, gives error "dd bs: illegal numeric value")

So what does this error mean? Why is 1M an illegal numeric value?

All i need to do is reflash my wiikey and then its not a total waste. In the meantime, i'll check my wiring and soldering for a 4th time just to make sure everything is solid and wired up correctly, but i researched this for weeks before attempting and had everything laid out in front of me, including my diagram, when I finally attempted it. Not sure why the system froze up on updating.

Thanks for the help!

-Weedenfeed

 

[weedenfeed]

I hadn't heard from anybody since my last post, so I did some more research and figured out my issue with the disk restore image.

For everyone who uses MACOSX and needs to set up a restore SD card to restore their wiikey, the instructions that are included with the restore iso from WiiKey's website are not complete/innacurate. The correct process is below:

1. Download the recovery ISO from WiiKey's website, and extract the wkf_recover_1_2.iso to your desktop.

1. Insert your SD card into your MAC and open disk utility from the Applications/Utilities folder.

2. Find your SD card in the list. It should list your SD card, and it should also list a partition of the disk that is currently mounted on your machine. Right click on the partition (not the main SD listing) and select "Unmount". This will unmount the partition, but the SD card itself will still be connected to the computer. (the instructions included with the restore ISO don't mention this step. If you try to dump the ISO on your card without doing this step, you get an error that says "dd: /dev/disk1: Resource busy".)

3. Open up Terminal in the Applications/Utilities folder. Type in "diskutil list" into terminal and it will display all disks currently loaded on your computer. Usually, /dev/disk0 will be your hard drive. Pay close attention to this. On my machine my SD card was listed as dev/disk1. I knew this because it shows you the storage capacity of each drive.

4. Next in Terminal, enter the following code: dd if=desktop/wkf_recover_1_2.iso of=/dev/disk1 bs=1m . Two things to note about this.
a. Where it says of=/dev/disk1, enter the destination of your SD drive here, whether it was disk1 or disk 2, etc. JUST DONT PUT YOUR MAIN HARD DRIVE DESTINATION HERE!
Triple check this step if you can. It will erase your hard drive if you do.
b. At the end of the code, there is the piece bs=1m. On the instructions that come with the recovery ISO, it says to type bs=1M. Do not capitalize the M or you will get an error. It
has to be lower case.

5. Your SD card should now have the recovery ISO dumped to it.

I did that at work this morning and got it all to work properly after some research. Tonight or tomorrow I will try to restore my WiiKey and hopefully it will work again. Good luck to anyone else that has had this problem.

-Weedenfeed

 

[Ashen]

Nice job man. I hope it works out for you.

 

[weedenfeed]

Thanks Ashen! I'll let everyone know if I get it going again.

 

[weedenfeed]

One more quick question, sorry for being a bother.

When my WiiKey was up and running, i did have one other weird issue. At the ISO select menu, i had two options: Update 1.5 and Settings. Whenever i selected Update 1.5 with the controller, it went into settings instead. It basically was that everything I selected, it actually activated whatever was below it. So i went in and selected the blank space above the Update 1.5, and it activated the update!?

Why would it do this? Do i have a wire messed up, or could faulty grounding make this happen? Should I have used thicker wires other than IDE cable?

Just curious. Thanks!

-Weedenfeed

 

[Tchay]

I'm afraid my post was eaten up by other peoples' issues. So the original issue is below. Now, I get this error "gamecube cnnot read disc, please consult instruction booklet....etc." I get that error before doing anything and right on startup when I go to the disc boot part of the menu. Before pushing the detection switch (which seems to work right, but the linux doesnt show up).

I am worried that I messed up my mobo somehow. I did something stupid and wired another motherboard to that same connector board while the wiikey was still wired to this current board. Although I only turned on the other board, the signals were technically going through the lines to the other gamecube board. I don't know if that would some how screw things up, but could that be it???


original post

My wiikey fusion keeps giving an error on the startup menu. It will say something like "Gamecube cannot read disc....blah blah blah". The switch works fine, when I push the detection switch, it will say "reading disc" like it should, but then go to that error.

My wiikey was fine a few weeks ago, but I took a 2 week break, started it up again and had this problem. The only thing I changed was adding 3 volt regulators.

I've been checking all the connections for the past few days and everything still appears fine. The blue light comes on, but doesn't flicker before turning off (like it normally would). The wiikey is fine since it happens on my other wiikey that works as well.

I will keep checking everything, but maybe someone knows what might be the issue. I feel like some wire is out of place. I did pop off a few and solder them back on, so its possible I flip flopped some of them....

 

[Ashen]

At the ISO select menu, i had two options: Update 1.5 and Settings. Whenever i selected Update 1.5 with the controller, it went into settings instead. It basically was that everything I selected, it actually activated whatever was below it. So i went in and selected the blank space above the Update 1.5, and it activated the update!?

Why would it do this? Do i have a wire messed up, or could faulty grounding make this happen? Should I have used thicker wires other than IDE cable?

This was an issue with early wiikey firmwares where the cursor would display fuxored, Its (kind of) fixed in the later firmwares.

I am worried that I messed up my mobo somehow. I did something stupid and wired another motherboard to that same connector board while the wiikey was still wired to this current board. Although I only turned on the other board.

This was probably a bad idea. Even though the other MB was not powered on it still lets data signals travel through its GPU and CPU at low resistances. Prolly fuxored something. I'd try your wiikey on a new board.

 

[ShockSlayer]

Yeah I noticed my arrow got more off center as I went down the list, maybe it has something to do with capital letters...

SS

 

[nuke]

Rewired, wiikey with thinner wires, still not working. It still says, "Please insert Disk" or whatever.Then of course I get the got damned error.Suggestions?

 

[Ashen]

I'm not sure what to tell you at this point man. If its not working then you did something wrong, plain and simple. You need to re-check everything under a Dang microscope.

If it was a IPL incompatibility the GameCube would freeze when you press the "eject" button. You may still end up with a incompatible IPL board, but if the GC is not freezing when the button is pressed you're still doing something wrong.

 

[weedenfeed]

I'm still having a similar issue.

On a good note, I took my recovery ISO home last night and after rewiring my ground connections, I put the SD card in, turned on the Gamecube and eureka! It loaded perfectly the first time! No issues at all. So i went ahead and installed the recovery ISO to reflash my wiikey.

Next I went upstairs and formatted the same SD card with WBFS Manager, and put on it the WiiKey 1.5 update ISO from WiiKey's website. Went back downstairs, popped in the SD card, started up the Gamecube, and....crap. Crappity crap crap.

I am now getting the same errors I was getting before. Sometimes it would load correctly and then freeze up, sometimes it would load correctly but then the "Cannot read disk" would pop up. Sometimes it won't load at all and say "cannot read disk". Sometimes it just flashes on the Linux select screen between "insert a disk", "reading disk" and "Cannot read disk" very quickly, like something is shorted, and the WiiKey itself sometimes the blue light just flickers and flashes, and other times it stays on.

And this morning, I tried it and i couldn't even get it to boot at all, and for some reason the vibration on my controller turned on and then the system froze, and the vibration kept going on constantly!?

I am at a loss for words on this one. About the only thing left to do is just start over and rewire the entire thing. Maybe this time i'll use my 26 gauge wire instead of the IDE cable for all data connections. My grounds are all 22 gauge so those should be fine.

I double-triple checked all my connections and I absolutely could not find any bridge or short, but I must have missed something.

I don't know when i'll have time to rewire everything, but if anyone has any suggestions in the meantime, please help me out, i'm all ears.

thanks in advance!

-Weedenfeed

 

[nuke]

Alright recheck connections, continuity, and stuff, I get "Reading Disk" and no errors...Sometimes.Mostly please insert disk.Suggestions?