As I posted in the Buggin thread my Wii U died on me, it gives a Disc Drive error code, and I'm unsure exactly what it meant as there were no solutions on the net for it short of sending it into Nintendo for a costly repair. Wii U disc drives are pretty cheap to order on the net, but others had swapped the disc drive without it fixing this problem, so I didn't know if that would help. Thankfully Some Stupid Japanese Santa sent me the busted system that Pineapple had, so that maybe I could figure out which part was broken.
Since I hate the cold and there was snow everywhere on Saturday I went at it, taking apart both systems and swapping drive mechanisms. Unfortunately that didn't fix it, after much testing it seems that the DVD drive board itself is toast, and for piracy reasons those are tied to the console and can't be replaced short of sending it in to Nintendo. Fuck. Defeated, I turn to Pineapple's old system so see if maybe I can fix the overheating issues instead. Seems that I can! I put it back together using some parts from my system as a donor and it seems to work 100%. I got my daughter to test it by playing 3D Worl for about an hour, no problems whatsoever. I guess that since I basically got a free Wii U I can deal with the loss of my digital content...
Sunday I poke around Nintendo's support website, which is generally mostly useless. However, I found a link in a FAQ page about what to do if your old Wii U is broken and you buy a new one. Lo and behold Nintendo has stepped up their game. In the past people have had to send their old systems in to get licenses transferred, but now apparently support can do that remotely. I sent them an email with the serial numbers from both machines and after about 10 minutes they emailed back saying the content licenses were transferred, and I could log into the new system with my Nintendo ID and download all my jams again. The fact that you have to do this is stupid, but I'm really impressed with Nintendo support's promptness, on a Sunday no less.
TLDR: Big thanks to SSJN for the hookup! Although I couldn't fix my old system I still ended up with a fully functional U in the end, which is what matters.
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