Hacking Corrupted SD card data on N3DS

[yaum]

Hi all,
I have this N3DS with luma installed, and had a 64GB sd card in it. SD card was getting full with mp3, games, saves and daughter was having some problems with saves data corrupted, and the additional data listed a few entries with a grey question mark, zero in size that I couldn't delete.
I decided to run a chkdsk on the SD card to maybe get rid of the ?0 size entries, and maybe solving the unable to save problems of terraria+minecraft.

I got a bunch of found.000 .chk files. When reinserting SD card, I had the exact same problems + all playlists (selections) in the sound studio disappeared, and I cannot create a new one anymore.

Got a spare 256Gb sd card, tested it with h2testw, copied the contents of the old 64GB to the new 256GB, with exactly the same problems...

My questions:

• Is there a way to solve the initial problems through a method I didn't try?
• In the case all is lost, and I have to start from scratch, what's the fastest way to reinstall everything on the new SD card? (downloaded stuff, savegames, installed games / programs, HB, anemone themes, created audio sounds,Miis...)

Thanks!

 

[yaum]

OK. I did not find how to solve the problems on the initial SD card, so I took the action to restart from scratch with a new SD card.

Steps:

As a step 0, follow this guide: https://3ds.hacks.guide/h2testw-(windows)
then, do the rest ->

1. Save your data on the old SD card with checkpoint: savegames + exdata (press X)
2. Plug your SD card in your computer. Copy all your save data from the '\3ds\Checkpoint' folders save & exdata on your computer. copy your anemone themes from '\Themes', photos from '\DCIM'. Do not copy '\Nintendo 3ds', as it is corrupted
3. Format the new SD card with guiformat in FAT32. if size <64GB, use 32k unit allocation size, and 64k if above 64GB. If guiformat has problems formatting the card, it might be that you'll have to go through the disk utility to delete the existing partitions. Only create a simple volume, do not create a partition, allocate a drive letter and launch again guiformat
4. Follow this guide to initialize the SD card with HB menu: https://3ds.hacks.guide/restoring-cfw
5. Insert your new SD card in your computer and copy all data coming from point 2, create the folders if needed
6. Use custom-install to install all your games & update cias (will not work if you did not initialize sd card, see point 4)
7. Insert new sd card in your 3DS
8. Launch HB menu, and launch custom-install-finalize to finish the install from custom-install
9. Before restoring your saves, you have to launch each game, make a first save for each. Then, launch Checkpoint and select each game and restore the savegame. This is quite painful, but this is the only way...

Nota: the Mii are stored on the console, not on the SD card, do not lose ages trying to extract them from the SD card like me...

 

[lone_wolf323]

OK. I did not find how to solve the problems on the initial SD card, so I took the action to restart from scratch with a new SD card.

Steps:

1. Save your data on the old SD card with checkpoint: savegames + exdata (press X)
2. Plug your SD card in your computer. Copy all your save data from the '\3ds\Checkpoint' folders save & exdata on your computer. copy your anemone themes from '\Themes', photos from '\DCIM'. Do not copy '\Nintendo 3ds', as it is corrupted
3. Format the new SD card with guiformat in FAT32. if size <64GB, use 32k unit allocation size, and 64k if above 64GB. If guiformat has problems formatting the card, it might be that you'll have to go through the disk utility to delete the existing partitions. Only create a simple volume, do not create a partition, allocate a drive letter and launch again guiformat
4. Follow this guide to initialize the SD card with HB menu: https://3ds.hacks.guide/restoring-cfw
5. Insert your new SD card in your computer and copy all data coming from point 2, create the folders if needed
6. Use custom-install to install all your games & update cias (will not work if you did not initialize sd card, see point 4)
7. Insert new sd card in your 3DS
8. Launch HB menu, and launch custom-install-finalize to finish the install from custom-install
9. Before restoring your saves, you have to launch each game, make a first save for each. Then, launch Checkpoint and select each game and restore the savegame. This is quite painful, but this is the only way...

Nota: the Mii are stored on the console, not on the SD card, do not lose ages trying to extract them from the SD card like me...

You still should test both cards with card testing app the guide has to make sure your cards are ok to use and wont just have more corruption show up at some point

 

[yaum]

You still should test both cards with card testing app the guide has to make sure your cards are ok to use and wont just have more corruption show up at some point

Yup, you're right, I forgot to mention that I did this the day before, will update the sequence accordingly