Tue Jan 05, 2010 12:09 pm by BlackSheep11777
There is nothing on this site that compares to the guide I link to. It is well organized, well maintained and covers a wide range of topics. It has links to all the needed files, too. It would be silly to attempt to replicate all of that good work here, just to keep traffic up. I have no affiliation with the site, I just found it give a very complete picture of what can be done and how to do it. What you *can't* do at that site is ask specific questions. If someone is looking for general information about Wii hacking, that type of resource is invaluable. When they get stuck on something, they can come back here to ask for help, post ideas or just shoot the breeze.
The OP sounds like a smart cookie who just wants to know as much as he can before starting so he doesn't wind up with an expensive paperweight attached to his TV. It's true that he might find everything he needs elsewhere and never come back, or he might read that guide and come back here to help other people (like I did). What won't bring him back is self-professed Wii haters picking fights with other people and calling them noobs.
To answer the original question more fully, hackmii is just the install package for the homebrew channel, DVDx and bootmii. The HBC and DVDx are both very safe to install and relatively easy to get rid of if you need to.
Bootmii is a different animal. It comes in two flavors, boot2 and ios. The hackmii installer will tell you if it's capable of installing bootmii as boot2. There are risks to doing so, since you're basically fiddling with the software that runs before the system menu even starts. However, there is a very big benefit to doing so. Bootmii lets you dump a backup image of the internal memory of the Wii. Should anything ever go wrong with a bad app or a bad channel and you can't even start the HBC or system menu, bootmii lets you restore your backup image.
If you can't install it as boot2, bootmii can still run after the boot process and will still let you make backup images, but since you have to start it like any other application, your ability to restore your backup may be limited. I've read about a program called Preloader that will run before the system menu and can be configured to automatically boot to the HBC, system menu or an arbitrary app, so if you use that you may be able to recover from some kinds of problems, but it's definitely not the safety net that boot2 provides.
As for other types of homebrew, pretty much anything that just runs off your SD card is perfectly safe. Anything that writes to your Wii's internal memory (Wad Manager is the most common example) is more dangerous, but still pretty safe as long as you're just using wads from the Nintendo store. Customized wads can cause problems if they have a badly formatted banner picture and you don't have a way to skip the system menu.
One other thing that's been mentioned. Don't upgrade your system menu through Nintendo, whether that be through the automatic updater or from game discs. There are "safe" update packages out there that will install newer files while still preserving the exploits in older files.
If you have questions about any other specific apps or tools, ask away.