Salvaging Corrupted Memory Card Save?

[Coalascension]

Hello! I've been playing Mana Khemia and sunk some 20something hours into it, but ran into a problem around Ch7 Week 4/5 or so. I've been saving normally via card for the entire game and figured I'd save before the end of chapter event, but when I tried like normal the game managed to pull up the save menu with all the previous saves... then failed to save. Backing out of the menu and trying again made it instead stop recognizing that there were any save files at all, or that there even was a memory card inserted. 

I unfortunately don't have a save state from before the game started refusing to recognize the card. I have tried restarting the PS2 state and letting it load from title screen, but no dice there; still no memory card. I went and made a save state after this started happening just to try to keep at least the current progress saved somewhere, but I'm aware it's an untenable situation, especially because the state likely won't be able to save at all going forward either.

I've got a bunch of saves scattered around the game on this card for ease of revisiting past events and don't really want to try to start fresh; is there any way to somehow fix whatever issue might have cropped up on the card? I've tried MYMC but honestly don't know what I'm doing with it, all I can tell is that it can open up a card to import and export saves...? Not anything like repairing a damaged save or card.

Edit: Forgot to add; I do have the backup before save setting toggled, does that get saved... anywhere? Because if I can retrieve whatever the last good save was, that'd be fine too.

[pandubz]

Hello! I've been playing Mana Khemia and sunk some 20something hours into it, but ran into a problem around Ch7 Week 4/5 or so. I've been saving normally via card for the entire game and figured I'd save before the end of chapter event, but when I tried like normal the game managed to pull up the save menu with all the previous saves... then failed to save. Backing out of the menu and trying again made it instead stop recognizing that there were any save files at all, or that there even was a memory card inserted. 

I unfortunately don't have a save state from before the game started refusing to recognize the card. I have tried restarting the PS2 state and letting it load from title screen, but no dice there; still no memory card. I went and made a save state after this started happening just to try to keep at least the current progress saved somewhere, but I'm aware it's an untenable situation, especially because the state likely won't be able to save at all going forward either.

I've got a bunch of saves scattered around the game on this card for ease of revisiting past events and don't really want to try to start fresh; is there any way to somehow fix whatever issue might have cropped up on the card? I've tried MYMC but honestly don't know what I'm doing with it, all I can tell is that it can open up a card to import and export saves...? Not anything like repairing a damaged save or card.

Edit: Forgot to add; I do have the backup before save setting toggled, does that get saved... anywhere? Because if I can retrieve whatever the last good save was, that'd be fine too.

The hard reality of PS2 memory cards is that once a save file dies, it is gone forever. Due to the low level access PS2 games had to memory cards they all can do slightly different things to them, and sometimes they can get in a weird situation where they just brick the save file.

The only last ditch attempt I can think is if you swap out memory cards (put Mcd002 into slot 1), start a new game, save at least once, load your save state, and see if it will let you save again. You may need to try a few times after loading the savestate for it to let you proceed (auto ejection is a safety feature where we temporarily eject memory cards after loading a savestate, it prevents memory cards from instantly having junk written to them). If the game still will not acknowledge the save file, then there's nothing else you can do but try to push onward with savestates alone.

The back up option is for savestates, not memory cards.

[Coalascension]

The hard reality of PS2 memory cards is that once a save file dies, it is gone forever. Due to the low level access PS2 games had to memory cards they all can do slightly different things to them, and sometimes they can get in a weird situation where they just brick the save file.

The only last ditch attempt I can think is if you swap out memory cards (put Mcd002 into slot 1), start a new game, save at least once, load your save state, and see if it will let you save again. You may need to try a few times after loading the savestate for it to let you proceed (auto ejection is a safety feature where we temporarily eject memory cards after loading a savestate, it prevents memory cards from instantly having junk written to them). If the game still will not acknowledge the save file, then there's nothing else you can do but try to push onward with savestates alone.

The back up option is for savestates, not memory cards.

Ouch, nothing for it than to actually back up the card file before each save, huh? That's so weird. I remember some games did have issues on actual console (though I never was bothered much by PS2 games compared to the hell that GC FF:CC gave me); I didn't realize the same problems would be replicated so faithfully on a virtual one. Guess that just says something for how accurate the emulation is, huh.

I'll see if I can salvage at least the current save with the method you said; I assume the rest might be lost, though I'm not entirely sure how it works on games that shove their multiple saves into one savefile. Fingers crossed.

[vsub]

That's one reason to use the Folder Memory Card feature instead of the old memory card which is just one file that any game can damage and you can possibly lose your progress for all of your games

[Coalascension]

That's one reason to use the Folder Memory Card feature instead of the old memory card which is just one file that any game can damage and you can possibly lose your progress for all of your games

That's a separate utility from the emulator itself, right? I did a quick search of the forums and turned out your rar packages for it; I have to convert the existing memcards into folders, or am I initializing a new save structure?

[RedDevilus]

Folder memcards will give 8MB per game , only limited by your free space on your storage device. The converting process actually makes a copy of your file memcard and turns that into folders but you still have the original memcard you can reiterate on this process to convert it back if needed.

[DustynB]

About 3 years ago I was playing thru Suikoden IV just so I could get a 100% save to load into Suikoden Tactics.  I only had about 2 hours left of game time before I had completed it, and then my memory card save crapped out.  All that progress and hundreds of hours of my life gone.  It made me physically ill.... 

 So now I have about 40 copies of my memory card folder(well a collection of all memory cards on all emulators) all over my computer.  I have one in Google Drive, I have one in Box, I have one in OneDrive, I have one in Dropbox.  I have one on several thumb drives....  Yea it always takes something like what you are going thru to make sure you never experience it again 

And now I am 45 hours back into Suikoden IV.  I will play Suikoden Tactics one day! 

[Coalascension]

I'm updating this topic real quick with a "I lucked out" because it turns out in converting the corrupted card/save to folder, I noticed that the resulting save file was missing just the icon.sys file, and comparing the other filesizes remaining with saves created on other cards trying to troubleshoot this/to start over with, everything seemed to be in order.

So I copied the icon.sys file from one of the newer cards over into the folder for the old card and blam, I can load that save again! What an odd little corruption.