So today, when I opened my 20XX Melee ISO (a modded ISO of the regular Smash Bros Melee 1.02 ISO) for about the fourth time this day, an in-game message popped up telling me "The Memory Card in Slot A is corrupted so it must be formatted. OK?". I was a little surprised and worried because I had been doing a couple things with Dolphin today, which I will get to in a bit.
First, some background information:
I have TWO separate GC Folders that store Save files for my GameCube games, so it gets a little confusing. I don't remember how I ended up with two, but I never bothered merging them because I usually only play Melee/the 20XX ISO which, of course, is only on one of the Memory Cards.
The paths for these Memory Cards are:
C:/Users/<My Name>/Documents/Dolphin Emulator/GC/MemoryCardA.USA.raw
and
C:/Users/<My Name>/Desktop/Folders/GameCube and Wii ISOs/GC/
I believe I had been using the first path for my 20XX Save.
Now here is all of the suspicious activity I did with Dolphin that MAY have somehow indirectly messed up all my stuff (hopefully in the order that it happened today):
(See EDIT at the bottom for why I crossed out the first two things)
Here are the details of the Memory Card corruption incident:
What I am asking from you:
So I'm hoping that there is possibly some way to restore the corrupted saves (I didn't lose anything TOO important, but I would be better off recovering them) and that someone can point out what I did to corrupt my files so I can avoid it in the future.
Thanks for your time!
CPU: i7-5500U Processor @ 2.40GHz
RAM: 8.0GB PC3-12800 DDR3L 1600 MHz
GPU: AMD Radeon R9 M275 2GB
Operating System: Windows 10
EDIT: I am desperately trying to remember exactly what I did between the time my Memory Card worked last and when it said it was corrupted. I can't remember when or why I opened Memcard Manager, but if it helps, I will cross out all but the only three things I could have possibly done with Dolphin in that time.
First, some background information:
I have TWO separate GC Folders that store Save files for my GameCube games, so it gets a little confusing. I don't remember how I ended up with two, but I never bothered merging them because I usually only play Melee/the 20XX ISO which, of course, is only on one of the Memory Cards.
The paths for these Memory Cards are:
C:/Users/<My Name>/Documents/Dolphin Emulator/GC/MemoryCardA.USA.raw
and
C:/Users/<My Name>/Desktop/Folders/GameCube and Wii ISOs/GC/
I believe I had been using the first path for my 20XX Save.
Now here is all of the suspicious activity I did with Dolphin that MAY have somehow indirectly messed up all my stuff (hopefully in the order that it happened today):
- I downloaded a new version of Dolphin (4.0-5811 to be specific)
- I renamed a few Folders containing the extracted files from various Dolphin downloads
- I "Browse"d a couple of my Memory Cards in the apparently infamous Memcard Manager. Just to be clear, when I say "Memcard Manager", I mean "Tools">"Memcard Manager (GC)" in Dolphin
(NOTE: Yes, this one seems the most likely and I did NOT see the warning at the top of the window before doing so. I'm fairly certain I didn't do anything to the actual saves, I just viewed them by hitting "Browse" and only went as far as to highlight a single save if I remember correctly)
- I used a patching program to downgrade my Brawl 1.02 ISO to version 1.00 so that I could create a Project M 3.6 Beta ISO with the correct md5 checksum
- I then proceeded to create the Project M ISO and play it before finding that my 20XX Save had been corrupted
(See EDIT at the bottom for why I crossed out the first two things)
Here are the details of the Memory Card corruption incident:
- Out of the 4 separate .raw files (the USA and EUR files of both GC Folders), ONLY the USA .raw file in the first GC Folder and the EUR .raw file from the second GC Folder seem to have NOT been corrupt.
This means that I still have a useless Melee save with almost nothing unlocked on the USA file, and a Paper Mario: TTYD and barely started Mario Sunshine on the EUR file.
This is fortunate because my Paper Mario: TTYD save is safe on the EUR file, which I mostly care about.
On the other hand, this isn't so great because I lost my LoZ: Wind Waker save which I spent a bunch of time on, but don't care for nearly as much as Paper Mario.
- I'm pretty sure I viewed all 4 .raw files in Memcard Manager, so I'm not sure why two of them got corrupted and two didn't
- I did already look online for some solutions and from what I gathered, corrupted saves should still be view able in Memcard Manager? I'm not sure about this one, but either way, the saves I lost have completely disappeared it seems. (See my next post for the reason)
What I am asking from you:
So I'm hoping that there is possibly some way to restore the corrupted saves (I didn't lose anything TOO important, but I would be better off recovering them) and that someone can point out what I did to corrupt my files so I can avoid it in the future.
Thanks for your time!

CPU: i7-5500U Processor @ 2.40GHz
RAM: 8.0GB PC3-12800 DDR3L 1600 MHz
GPU: AMD Radeon R9 M275 2GB
Operating System: Windows 10
EDIT: I am desperately trying to remember exactly what I did between the time my Memory Card worked last and when it said it was corrupted. I can't remember when or why I opened Memcard Manager, but if it helps, I will cross out all but the only three things I could have possibly done with Dolphin in that time.