Error 0000FE00

I purchased my son a DSi Used from ebay. I played it for a few hours then put it on a shelf for a few weeks till birthday. When his birthday came he used it for about four hours then an error came up 0000FE00.

I have googled around and found various conversations about how to get the DS to boot back the game it faulted on. Nothing I tried work, and so my only other idea was to purchase a R4i Chip / carrier and try to get it to boot off this chip.

What I tried:
1) Take 1GB microSD card and unpack "R4 V1.35b English" onto the formatted sd card [directory structure file "R4.dat" directory "moonmemo" directory "moonshl2" directory "R4iMenu"]
Question: I would have thought that the DS booting from the SD card would have looked for some kind of MBR loaded on the flash card, or some more specific file name like 'kernel.bin"... Can someone explain the boot chain procedure, or at least the file objects it looks for to begin the bootstrap.

2) I found another download / site "R4 DS (E) steup" and this had similar results, the DS never attempts to boot from the micro SD card. I don't know if the reason is that the correct format/ bootstrap files are present or that the error "0000FE00" reflects some other error in the boot process that needs to be fixed.


Any direction would be appreciated. The goal is to get the DSi functional for the kid, I have no problems taking it apart or doing surgery / low level flashing.

I noted the posting about flashing but the YouTube Videos are pulled.

Thanks,