“New” method allows to unbrick Wii U consoles without soldering required

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I do not follow the Wii U scene extremely closely, but Youtuber Voultar has recently brought to light a somewhat recent hack of the console that allows to repair bricked WiiU consoles through software means, with just a $8 Raspberry Pico.

Wii U – What’s UDPIH and how can it help with Error 160-0101?

Back in June 2022, Hacker GaryOderNichts released UDPIH, a USB hack impacting the Wii U’s boot code. This hack is groundbreaking in multiple ways, in particular: 1) since it uses USB, no soldering skills are required, and 2) it runs very early in the boot process, meaning it can be used to unbrick in a lot of cases.

The Wii U is a fairly old console, and although this hack certainly didn’t flow under the radar for enthusiasts, for the broader population (including myself), this release has been mostly ignored. The result is that a lot of mainstream websites, and therefore google, think that the only way to unbrick a Wii U is through difficult hardware mods that require soldering skills. UDPIH changes that.

Now, there is a range of Wii U errors that can actually be solved by reinstalling the OS  fixing the startup title. through the UDPIH exploit (and associated recovery menu). This apparently includes error codes 160-0101 and 160-0103, at least in Voultar’s tests, but possibly not in all cases.

Can UDPIH fix ALL Bricked Wii U consoles?

Basically if the error is just one of software corruption of the system, fixing the OS through the UDPIH exploit will definitely solve it. If the underlying issue however is deeper (such as, but not limited to, an actually damaged memory component), the tool won’t help of course. Or only temporarily.

Voultar mentions in his video that  “evidently these [Wii U] systems have been dying left and right”, implying the issue is on the rise. Although I don’t have any data on that, if Wii U’s are starting to fail because of old age, I’m not sure how “permanent” a fix such as reinstalling the OS can be. There might be something deeper here, consoles don’t just corrupt themselves by magic. Now, it is possible that the consoles being repaired by Voultar were actually corrupted through improper use of hacks or homebrew (and the eBay seller didn’t know they could easily fix it), in which case the UDPIH repair will work long term. But, if as he claims, there is an increase in such failures on Wii U’s, it could be due to a more problematic component failure issue.

It would actually be interesting to see if cheap bricked Wii U’s can be acquired on p2p marketplaces for easy repairs, although I suspect that with GaryOderNichts’s release having happened almost a year ago now, the clever folks in the Wii U scene have caught up on that already 🙂

In any case, if your Wii U console appears to be bricked, and in particular if it shows error message 160-0101 or 160-0103, you definitely want to give this unbrick method a try.

Check out Voultar’s repair video below, as well as download links for the UDPIH tool.

Download UDPIH for Wii U repair/unbrick