Memory Card A damaged

[PJ1897]

I was playing my save of Wind Waker LoZ and decided to take a break but when I came backe to it later it said Memory Card A id broken or damaged. I've looked at other threads but everything is either said to simply so I can't foloow it correctly or too complicated and has to much jargon and neoligisms. Please I want to play my Wind Waker as I was just on my way to the second dungeon! Please reply but in a simple understanable way!

[KHg8m3r]

Did you use savestates?

[pauldacheez]

Breaking your memory card save in Wind Waker is as easy as making a save state, doing a memory-card save, loading that save state, and trying to make another memcard save. You probably ended up doing that at some point, possibly with extra steps in between. (This wouldn't be an issue if Dolphin embedded the game's .gci in each save state, but that'd also require more than a bit of work to implement without leaving a mess.)

tl;dr, if you load a save state that was made before the last time you made a memcard save, don't try making another memcard save. (Or, better yet, don't use save states at all.)

I'm also pretty sure there's no way to recover a save file if you've already done this. You're gonna have to just start over, which shouldn't be too awful as it's only two or three hours of work.

[KHg8m3r]

You could delete your Memory card, load the save state, and try saving in-game. (this happened to me, and I think that's how I fixed it)

[LPFaint99]

Load game
Load State
Open Config
Change EXI Slot A to <None>
close Config
Reopen Config
Change EXI Slot A to MemoryCard
try to save ingame

[pauldacheez]

Why the FUCK have you not shared this method before. I'm putting this in my pasteable-snippet box so I can throw it at other people.

[LPFaint99]

I have, I can dig up the post if you want
not guaranteed to work of course, but it is usually successful
The other option is to do the same thing except delete the game's save from the memcard first

edit -- apparently the last time I posted it was pretty recently
https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-savestate-to-memcard?pid=298269#pid298269

Quick explaination:
The game (usually first party) keeps the state of the memcard, and after loading the savestate, the game sees that the memcard state has changed, but thinks it has been connected the whole time.
These steps essentially pull the memcard out (The game gets an interrupt saying that the card was removed)
and putting a "different" memcard in. (The game now has no expectations about what is on the card)

[tueidj]

It's the virtual hardware equivalent of turning it off then on again.

[JMC47]

Favoriting this thread for life simply because of pauldachz reaction.