PCSX2 randomly fully corrupted my memory card file

[goody_fyre11]

As the title says, I've been using the same memory card file for quite a while, years with no issues whatsoever.  About 5 minutes ago, I had loaded into a game perfectly fine, but I clicked the Reset option as I needed to reboot the game.  When it loaded back up, I noticed none of my games detected an inserted memory card, which was weird because the memory cards menu showed it was still in Slot 1.  I went into the BIOS and...
https://imgur.com/a/orkRFmd
The size now reads as 0 KB, and all save files on there read as corrupted data.  How does this even happen?  I've been using it for years with no issues, and none of the games I play have had their data corrupted naturally, but in less than 5 seconds it's all fully corrupted.  This seems like a PCSX2 bug, I used latest PCSX2 1.7 (v1.7.5201) if that matters.   Is it possible that my memory card only had its size bytes corrupted and the data is fine?  Is there a way of fixing this?  I tried MyMC but it can't open it.

I've attached the memory card file just in case.


  Mcd001.zip (Size: 1,17 MB / Downloads: 103)

[MrWizard]

So i don't know how but I'm fairly sure you somehow managed overrun your filesize by having too many saves on it. Unfortunately I lack expertise to figure out how to fix it. Trying to convert it out into a folder by extracting files fails at about 50% and hard-crashes the emulator. Interestingly... the contents of the file aren't actually 'full' per se i can see lots of binary data and there's a huge chunk of empty space still there. I'm leaning towards corrupted somehow

I wonder if this is replicateable and is an actual bug of saving too many things onto a save card or a corrupted file case.

[goody_fyre11]

The memory card was barely full, it was the 32MB version, and last time I checked, it had 26MB empty. I rarely start playing new games ever, so there's no possible way it was too full.

[jesalvein]

some games won't like anything else than standard 8m cards. and a corruption may happen

[NarooN]

Yep, this behavior where some games just completely spazz out when reading anything greater than a normal 8MB card was present on the native physical PS2 hardware as well, which I learned the hard way back in the day lol, and it's what swore me off using those 3rd party cards ever since.

[goody_fyre11]

Would a folder type card get around that? Also, is there any unconventional way of getting at least some of the save files off of the card? I can see a lot of game strings in there, like ATV Offroad Fury 3's vehicle tuning settings.

[cyanea]

I recently had to recover my saves from a corrupted MC file and was successful in getting most of them back. Though in my case it was a standard 8MB MC and the corruption was probably caused by my heavy use of savestates (used them sorta like checkpoints/autosaves in modern games).

Depending on how exactly your MC got corrupted, it might be possible to restore your saves.

Edit: Somehow overlooked that you already attached your MC file. But at first glance - looks like it will be more difficult than my MC. I don't work with binary files all that often but to me it looks like your cards indirect FAT and part of the FAT (basically a list of where on the card your files are stored) got overwritten by some game's savedata. Which would explain why mymc can't find anything. Some of your saves might still be fine (can't say for sure at this point) but this will make recovery a lot more difficult.

Edit2: Okay, it's not looking good. Sadly lots of your savefiles link back into that overwritten part of the FAT and thus will be very hard or even impossible to recover. I've recovered what I could but it's not much. Also for what is there, I can't tell for sure wether those files are fully intact or not since I don't own any of these games.

I can see that there's some more files in your corrupted memory card that could be recovered by hand with a hex editor and lots of time. But that could take literal days or weeks for a few files and goes beyond what I can do.

In the future, I recommend using memory card folders since worst case scenario on those is probably a single save getting corrupted instead of a whole memory card. Regular backups would be good as well.