Hacking Any way to restore a corrupted GC memory card?

[Taleweaver]

Well...the topic title describes it more or less.

Since DML went public, I've been on and off testing. The memory card is pretty much stuck in slot A for as long as I can remember. It's big enough, it stores some savegames from quite some time ago as well as the data I wish to keep (PoP sands of time and F-Zero, mostly).

However, in testing to see how well Swiss and DML work together, something went wrong somewhere. Now all of the sudden, whenever I start a game, it says that the card is corrupt and needs to be reformatted.

Retrying doesn't help. Savegame manager GX doesn't have a department of GC data. And in the system menu...well...the first time I checked there, it still showed all my savegame data when I moved it to slot B. Figuring that had solved it, I tried again...yet still the same error.
Now even the wii menu savegame thingy wants to reformat my data disk.

I know this is part of testing. I have only myself to blame for fiddling too much. Still...is there any way to read and retrieve what's on the card? As in homebrew I don't know about?
(I wouldn't mind formatting it if I had my data backed up, so I could restore afterwards).


Lemme know, okay?



EDIT: hmm...and since I'm asking, I might as well follow it up with a second question: is there an fast and easy way to backup/restore the contents of a GC memory card?

 

[SanGor]

Though all your savfiles are probably still there it will be a pain to restore them, first you would need to find a tool that can read the card RAW.
Then you need to piece together the scattered parts of the savefiles, well to sum it up you should consider them lost for good ...

I think there are a few backup tools for GC that you can run on the Wii aswell.

 

[Taleweaver]

I noticed. Thanks to this very recent thread I was able to use GCMM to actually view the card (strangely enough only when it was in slot B) and backup all my savegames into different .gci files (they now have names like SD:\MCBACKUP\8P-GFZE-f_zero.dat.gci and SD:\MCBACKUP\01-GZLE-gczelda.gci).

To be honest, only the Beyond good and evil savegame looks weird (--JADEFILE.gci). But assuming I've got all the parts...would it be okay if I format the card and then put all the .gci games back onto it, or is that too simplistic?

 

[SanGor]

hmmm I guess but iirc formating asigns a new unique ID to the card so games that check the ID will not load the savefile anymore (4swords is the only game I know from the top of my head that checks the ID).

Maybe your slot A is broken?

 

[Taleweaver]

I was afraid for something like that (luckily, 4 swords adventure was already finished...it won't be much of a loss now). That make the next obvious question: is there a way of editing that ID? Or perhaps more likely: how do I find out the (new) ID of the memory card, so I can edit the savegames to reflect that?

Slot A isn't broken. Games and the wii setting don't recognize it in either slot (GCMM is the only exception), but when using my SD-gecko in slot A, I can start swiss.


BTW: thanks for all the answers thus far. I really appreciate it.

 

[Taleweaver]

Hmm...partial succes thus far. But not unsuspected.

I tried the GCMM version Hielkenator linked to in the other thread to backup my saves. Then I formatted the memory card using the wii menu.

Reloaded the GCMM version, but it wouldn't recognize my card anymore (error warning). However, as soon as I started a GC game and created a savegame, GCMM would recognize my card again -> restored all my savegames.

So far the good part. The bad part is that F-Zero now "just" doesn't like my previous savegame and wants it deleted. My second test game (paper mario) used the previous savegame without problems.

I'll see what further testing gives...

(in all cases, it's better than absolutely nothing ).


EDIT: PoP sands of time was restored successfully as well!!! (yeeey!!! I haven't lost an hour on that stupid circular moon pillar room for nothing! )

 

[tmv_josue]

hmmm I guess but iirc formating asigns a new unique ID to the card so games that check the ID will not load the savefile anymore (4swords is the only game I know from the top of my head that checks the ID).

So far the good part. The bad part is that F-Zero now "just" doesn't like my previous savegame and wants it deleted. My second test game (paper mario) used the previous savegame without problems.

F-Zero GX save the ID of the memory card.
You can backup the save, but only you can restore in MC from which was extracted (by his ID).
Formatting a MC change his ID and while you restore will not work.
Changing the ID manually (hexadecimal) the game is corrupted and doesnt endorse the CRC check (it breaks).
Would have to generate a new checksum to work in another MC or format the MC with the ID of the game.

 

[Lord Coolman]

Ctr-Gcs-DacoTaco-Edition

http://wiibrew.org/wiki/Talk:Ctr-Gcs-DacoTaco-Edition