SX OS hidden partition, How do you also hide homebrew or boot.dat/license?

[Outlawbiker]

Hello, Im a little rough around the edges to modding and a bit noobish to my switch, but have been using my 4.1 OFW switch offline since day one with SX OS on emunand and decided to start from scratch and go clean it up,so now Sysnand is restored and cleaned up and updated to 9.1 OFW for online use and i created my emunand with hidden partition. I have a couple of questions if any of you can help,I would be grateful.

1; My understanding is we create the hidden partition for SX OS to make sure big N cant see whats on the SD card now or in the future,if this is the case,how do we hide our boot.dat and license because it seems that i have to keep it at the root of my sd card to boot SX OS.

2; If we are hiding files and directories,then how would install KOSMOS/homebrew/apps/tools/XCI's etc and keep that hidden as well?

3; Is there a need to access the hidden partition for installing anything mentioned in 2 ? If so,how do you view the hidden partition?

 

[Outlawbiker]

what is the point of a hidden partition if you have to pull the sd card to be safe? maybe i miss read something and missed the point of doing it this way?

 

[Outlawbiker]

there is so many write ups all over the net,its been hard to find a straight answer,the common thing ive seen was sysnand (if clean) was ok for online, SX OS with emunand for homebrew and misc but NEVER to disable stealth and never to try and connect to eshop or nintendo services while in CFW, SX OS updates were fine and so was homebrew apps updates online? hell i dont know, the amount of info on this is all a mess and contradictory.

 

[NexNus]

there is so many write ups all over the net,its been hard to find a straight answer,the common thing ive seen was sysnand (if clean) was ok for online, SX OS with emunand for homebrew and misc but NEVER to disable stealth and never to try and connect to eshop or nintendo services while in CFW, SX OS updates were fine and so was homebrew apps updates online? hell i dont know, the amount of info on this is all a mess and contradictory.

while in stealthmode, you can have wifi on. all stealthmode does is prevent the switch from connecting to nintendo's online services and servers (which is why you shouldn't dissable it), you can download Homebrew all you want, just don't try and play any games online.

Hidden partition emunand was never to hide from Nintendo and make you safe from banning, it was a feature people requested because the first iteration of emunand for switch was stored directly to the switch NAND and people were supposidly getting banned for it, it was also what most people, that had come from 3DS hacking were use to. on files emunand is the best choice if you want ease of SD card transfer/ upgrade.

I know it's not advised, but, from my experience, as long as you don't run any illegally obtained roms, game mods, or install modded NSP's or homebrew NSP's to or on sysnand, you have a very low chance of getting a ban. no one can give you a 100% certainty because nobody knows what nintendo checks for when people had been banned in the past.

 

[Outlawbiker]

while in stealthmode, you can have wifi on. all stealthmode does is prevent the switch from connecting to nintendo's online services and servers (which is why you souuldnt dissable it), you can download Homebrew all you want.

Thats what I thought too from everything I seen, im just trying to do this right, I dont want to screw this up. To be clear, is SX OS emunand stored on internal memory in the console itself? or is it on the sd card?

 

[NexNus]

Thats what I thought too from everything I seen, im just trying to do this right, I dont want to screw this up. To be clear, is SX OS emunand stored on internal memory in the console itself? or is it on the sd card?

hidden partition stores emunand to SD on a hidden partition, to access it takes more effort than it's worth unless you want to minimize how much data it takes up on your sd.

 

[Outlawbiker]

hidden partition stores emunand to SD on a hidden partition, to access it takes more effort than it's worth unless you want to minimize how much data it takes up on your sd.

So because emunad is hidden and on the SD card, when i boot OFW normally, there should be no way that nintendo could know that im messing around with CFW because its completely separated from anything internal and isolated from the console itself, so in theory, its safe to use OFW online? Now if i add stuff like KOSMOS to the sd card or any utilities,tools,homebrew, i cant hide that on the sd card or would i want to or is there away to hide it?

 

[NexNus]

So because emunad is hidden and on the SD card, when i boot OFW normally, there should be no way that nintendo could know that im messing around with CFW because its completely separated from anything internal and isolated from the console itself, so in theory, its safe to use OFW online? Now if i add stuff like KOSMOS to the sd card or any utilities,tools,homebrew, i cant hide that on the sd card or would i want to or is there away to hide it?

yes, emunand is completly seperated from OFW, even if you use SD files emunand, it's completely separated from OFW.

hiding the files doesn't keep you hidden from nintendo.
Nintendo isnt going into your SD and syncing/ searching for particular files, they look into your system logs, or rather, they sync their servers to check your system logs (stored on NAND), and if looks like you were running something that you shouldnt have access to (like the Dev tools that leaked a long time ago) or some kind of suspicious activity happened, then you get banned.

hidden partition is purely if you don't want to mistakenly delete emunand, accidentally corrupt emunand or want to reduce the data consumed for emunand and has nothing to do with protecting / hiding them from nintendo. it's a misconception.

 

[Outlawbiker]

ok, so i assume that it doesnt matter about putting homebrew and what not on the sd card because CFW is going to be launched from it anyhow,just dont install/run CFW from sysnand right?

 

[NexNus]

ok, so i assume that it doesnt matter about putting homebrew and what not on the sd card because CFW is going to be launched from it anyhow,just dont install/run CFW from sysnand right?

exactly

 

[Outlawbiker]

cool,thank you guys both for clearing all this up,now i feel more confident about messing with this