GameCube Saves Corrupted/Disappeared

[LeCarpetron]

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):

• 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.

[LeCarpetron]

I don't know if it helps, but the reason I thought that I should still be able to see my corrupted saves is because of this guide I found:

http://garteal.hostoi.com/fixing-corrupt-save-games-in-dolphin/

This is probably outdated, but the person writing the article could still see his or her corrupted save in Memcard Manager, and the saves that I'm looking for in my Memory Card aren't there anymore.

---

I'm doing my best to make everything as clear as possible so I can hopefully get this problem resolved soon, so if there's anything unclear that may be important to the equation, PLEASE don't hesitate to ask/let me know

[LeCarpetron]

*Bump*

If anyone can offer any insight at all as to what the most common causes of memory card corruption are, that would be much appreciated! It would be even better if someone has heard of a fix!

[LPFaint99]

(08-04-2015, 01:30 PM)LeCarpetron Wrote: [*]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'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 don't think it is infamous, but I may be biases having written most of the memorycard manager.
I can say however, unless you actually copyto/delete from a memorycard, there is no modification done to the file.

All reported issues with the memory card manager have been solved, I am not aware of any conditions (excepting power failure/reboot during write/ other issues outside of the program) that would result in corruption. If there were, I would attempt to fix them, in fact anyone who comes across this post, PLEASE report reproducible issues with the memorycard manager to the issue tracker as well as directly to me via PM.

(08-04-2015, 01:30 PM)LeCarpetron Wrote: [*]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)
[/list]

.

(08-04-2015, 11:38 PM)LeCarpetron Wrote: I don't know if it helps, but the reason I thought that I should still be able to see my corrupted saves is because of this guide I found:

http://garteal.hostoi.com/fixing-corrupt-save-games-in-dolphin/

This is probably outdated, but the person writing the article could still see his or her corrupted save in Memcard Manager, and the saves that I'm looking for in my Memory Card aren't there anymore.

This is an outdated issue by a very long time.
Ancient versions of dolphin would fail to copy the gameid to some memory region, causing all saves to start with 6 nil bytes.
This was not a problem until the time that dolphin started to write the gameid to that memory region,
you see, these bytes are used to identify which saves belong to a particular game, before it appeared that all saves were for that game, and so it could find the correct one by 'filename'.

Once these bytes were correctly written, a game would say, give me all the saves on this card which belong to me
returning every save that matches the gameid, however 000000 was written from before, so the save was no longer 'owned' by that game.

(08-05-2015, 12:46 AM)LeCarpetron Wrote: I'm doing my best to make everything as clear as possible so I can hopefully get this problem resolved soon, so if there's anything unclear that may be important to the equation, PLEASE don't hesitate to ask/let me know

(08-06-2015, 11:28 AM)LeCarpetron Wrote: *Bump*

If anyone can offer any insight at all as to what the most common causes of memory card corruption are, that would be much appreciated! It would be even better if someone has heard of a fix!

not sure there are 'common causes'. As with any data you deem important, keep regular backups dropbox/etc is nice for this. You could switch to the GCI folder option, where all saves are distinct files on your hdd, where corruption of one is not a loss of the entire card.

If you upload your memory card file, I will take a look and see what if anything can be recovered

[LeCarpetron]

Thanks so much for the reply! I'll hop on my laptop right now and attempt to upload the files

[LeCarpetron]

Here are each of my 2 pairs of USA/EUR Memory Card files (I hope I uploaded them correctly).

[LeCarpetron]

(08-06-2015, 12:37 PM)LPFaint99 Wrote: I don't think it is infamous, but I may be biases having written most of the memorycard manager.
I can say however, unless you actually copyto/delete from a memorycard, there is no modification done to the file.

All reported issues with the memory card manager have been solved, I am not aware of any conditions (excepting power failure/reboot during write/ other issues outside of the program) that would result in corruption. If there were, I would attempt to fix them, in fact anyone who comes across this post, PLEASE report reproducible issues with the memorycard manager to the issue tracker as well as directly to me via PM.

(08-06-2015, 12:37 PM)LPFaint99 Wrote: This is an outdated issue by a very long time.
Ancient versions of dolphin would fail to copy the gameid to some memory region, causing all saves to start with 6 nil bytes.
This was not a problem until the time that dolphin started to write the gameid to that memory region,
you see, these bytes are used to identify which saves belong to a particular game, before it appeared that all saves were for that game, and so it could find the correct one by 'filename'.

Once these bytes were correctly written, a game would say, give me all the saves on this card which belong to me
returning every save that matches the gameid, however 000000 was written from before, so the save was no longer 'owned' by that game.

So is it completely safe for me to use the Memcard Manager to merge the two separate pairs of Memory Cards that I have (I now have a backup of the corrupted Memory Cards)?

[LPFaint99]

I guess I should've asked beforehand. It appears that you let the game reformat the cards? Unfortunately, the cards have no data at this point, if you have a copy of the cards from before the reformat, they may have data.

I don't know if anything is completely safe, but once you have backups, use the memorycard manager with confidence that even if something does go wrong, you can always restore your backups. Simply verify that all the games can load their save, and then you are set to use the merged card. On the remote chance that something goes wrong, create a new card for each region in the memorycardmanager, and merge the saves for that region to the new card

[LeCarpetron]

(08-08-2015, 02:32 AM)LPFaint99 Wrote: I guess I should've asked beforehand. It appears that you let the game reformat the cards? Unfortunately, the cards have no data at this point, if you have a copy of the cards from before the reformat, they may have data.

o.0 I swear, I did not let any of the games reformat the cards and I'm positive of that. I did test all of my GameCube games to see if they all wanted to reformat the cards, but then I would just immediately stop the game when the corruption message came up. This is why I said "Disappeared" in the title because according to that outdated article on fixing corrupted Memory Cards, you could still see the data, it just wouldn't work or something. In fact, I know that I still haven't reformatted the Memory Cards because they still state that they are corrupted.

(08-08-2015, 02:32 AM)LPFaint99 Wrote: I don't know if anything is completely safe, but once you have backups, use the memorycard manager with confidence that even if something does go wrong, you can always restore your backups. Simply verify that all the games can load their save, and then you are set to use the merged card. On the remote chance that something goes wrong, create a new card for each region in the memorycardmanager, and merge the saves for that region to the new card

That's what I figured, thanks.

[HomelandReloaded]

(08-08-2015, 03:07 AM)LeCarpetron Wrote:

(08-08-2015, 02:32 AM)LPFaint99 Wrote: I guess I should've asked beforehand. It appears that you let the game reformat the cards? Unfortunately, the cards have no data at this point, if you have a copy of the cards from before the reformat, they may have data.

o.0 I swear, I did not let any of the games reformat the cards and I'm positive of that. I did test all of my GameCube games to see if they all wanted to reformat the cards, but then I would just immediately stop the game when the corruption message came up. This is why I said "Disappeared" in the title because according to that outdated article on fixing corrupted Memory Cards, you could still see the data, it just wouldn't work or something. In fact, I know that I still haven't reformatted the Memory Cards because they still state that they are corrupted.

(08-08-2015, 02:32 AM)LPFaint99 Wrote: I don't know if anything is completely safe, but once you have backups, use the memorycard manager with confidence that even if something does go wrong, you can always restore your backups. Simply verify that all the games can load their save, and then you are set to use the merged card. On the remote chance that something goes wrong, create a new card for each region in the memorycardmanager, and merge the saves for that region to the new card

That's what I figured, thanks.

I found some in your attachments. Super Mario Sunshine (EUR) seems OK, but I cannot check Paper Mario (EUR) and Melee (USA) because I haven't got the games.