Corrupted Cartridge Fixer Release

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Made an account to reply to this - I have a bit of good news, some bad news, and also some VERY interesting news. My Pokémon Y cartridge was corrupted, so I ran this fixer many times.

Good news: Before I ran it at all, it simply would refuse to launch. After running it once and it doing a shitton of hash refreshes, it now boots and loads into the game!

Bad news: Some chunks still seem permanently unfixable. I’ve run it probably around 10 times, and with a total of around ~1,400 unfixable chunks, I am always running into them at the same percentage with around the same amount of chunks each time. I haven’t been able to do extensive testing, but it crashes at the start of the Lysandre battle in Geosenge Town about 99% of the time.

INTERESTING news: Despite this, dumping the cartridge as is into a CIA and running the game digitally from microSD card does not crash at the Lysandre battle at all. This suggests that some corrupted cartridges might still functionally work for dumping digitally, which is honestly a textbook case of a perfectly legal and valid reason to dump one’s cartridge for use on a modded 3DS.
EDIT: Forgot to add, cartridge fails verifications instantly, but the dumped CIA passes verification successfully.
Post automatically merged:

Update to my post above, this got… weirder and I no longer have a clean story. What I’ve confirmed since:
- Cart fails GM9 verification instantly, every single time.
- I dumped the cart, extracted it with 3dstool, and hash-compared every file against an extracted dump of a known-good copy (same game, same region). All 690 RomFS files identical. ExeFS identical, including code.bin. So the game data on my cart reads back intact.
- That first CIA passed GM9 verification and played through the Lysandre battle in Geosenge many times with no crash.

A few days later (just now) it stops making sense:
- Did a fresh dump and fresh install tonight. That second CIA also passes verification, buuuut it crashed at Lysandre twice.
- Went straight back to the cart expecting a crash, and the battle started fine for once…
So the crash doesn’t track with verification status, and doesn’t track with cart vs. digital. A verification-passing CIA crashed; the verification-failing cart didn’t. The cart still fails the large majority of the time, but not always. Crash is 0xd900458b (invalid RomFS or savedata hash), process 39. One constant I haven’t isolated is that the same ~40 hour save file is used in every test. I don’t have a pre-Lysandre save to compare against, and a statically damaged save would presumably(?) fail deterministically rather than ~95% of the time, so I’m not confident that’s it either.

No idea what to make of this tbh.
 

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Last edited by Pokebert,
What do you get when you run the fixer with logging?

crashes at the start of the Lysandre battle in Geosenge Town about 99% of the time.
That kind of sounds like it might be some physical connection-based issue, or that chunk is in the process of stabilizing.

You should also try to delete the update data for the game and redownload it. Could have an issue there.
 

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