Save Corruption (states + memcard) [resolved but curious about how / why]

[edcase]

Win 10 -- PCSX2: 1.6.0 -- FFX international (ntsc-j) -- [email protected] Document/Junk/PCSX2/ [drive D:] (~90 ingame hour).

Been replaying FFX whilst sick, using save states [F1-3] and the normal memcard game saves (auto eject + folder management ticked) with no problems.

Made a savestate mid blitzball match and it "paused" the content (minimises and freezes game till you resume it) and had a small dialogue window stating how it had saved the slot # in normal location... which is odd, thought i'd fumbled ESC whilst going for F1 or something. Hit "ok" on the dialogue, System > Resume, all was normal, thought better to be safe, F2 > F1 and zzzhp it minimised again giving me the same prompt but for the new slot number selected...

Weirded out, i think maybe some hotkey enabled verbose save mode, shrug and move on... finish the blitz game, then onto the next, F2 > F1 > oh ffffff, PCSX2 closed, no dialogue box.

Started it up again System > Boot Iso (fast) > F3 ... nope not this state, F2 > F3 state # is empty
I cycle through the states so there should be no empty ones, but i guess it glitched, not so bad since one of the earlier save states was fine... continues cycling to check

F2 > F3 empty F2 > F3 error savestate is corrupt or incomplete
Okay, so this was the one when it crashed, Shift F3 same corrupt error, this is fine, I'll just save the state here with it F1 --- damn, it crashed again?

Reloaded most recent state, F2 to oldest but working slot and hit F1 --- and it crashed again, now that state is empty?

Reload state again, go to make a 'real' save... my data in the save menu is not there, I try to save to an empty block 2 (all empty but I used block 1 before) this memory card is not formatted do this now? ...well this seems wrong but sure, it tries it but fails.

So, long story short, new save states crash PCSX2, some have went corrupt, and my memcard save also can't be accessed essentially.
PCSX2 lives on my G: drive, saves are in my D: documents drive; files are there, path has not changed, memcards folder is readonly but that seems by design.
made sure to try running PCSX2 as admin, no difference there, did notice in the log window it had a complaint that it could not open the .../inis/PCSX2_VM.ini

File was in location listed, but failed to open for me in notepad and notepad++...
Hmmm... Well shooot, so went to recreate that .ini error to recite more accurately and could not find it in console, so opened with notepad and it's fine, loaded game, saved over an 'empty' state, did not crash, loads fine. memory card is still unformatted, allowed the game to format it and made a fresh save and all is well.

The log did issue a "checksum sector overwritten. (0)" warning when formatting happened.
 

Well, um, solved? ima post this now since it's done, anyone know why it could not access or open that .ini, if just affecting that one file would cause the same issues, or why it flipped to being accessible again? Thanks for reading!

[edcase]

Just to clear some things:
It resolved over the course of 2 hours~
I had not reset the PC, but had relaunched the program as admin and normal many times in testing the problems
The issues were repeatable as reported above
I probably missed something on the earlier dialogue boxes when it paused the content, but didn't see an error
The 'normal location' was me just doing shorthand for the path to the savestate, it was normal
The '...' in /inis/PCSX2_VM.ini was shorthand for my D: Documents/Junk/PCSX2/ location
Drive was obviously functional considering it would F3 load and otherwise operate fine even after crashes
-----
Feel free to ask any questions or tell me to post a log if you let me know where they should be stored. I am curious to know why this occurred/reverted but mostly glad that it did. Didn't find any reports of similar when googling or searching the forum. Cheers

[pandubz]

No idea what the scenario is with savestates but if you have recently upgraded your PCSX2 version, know that savestate compatibility is nonexistent between stable versions, and not guaranteed with development builds.

As for "checksum sector overwritten" messages, that "checksum" is a fictional value which the original makers of PCSX2 memcards added to the memcards, though its exact purpose is unknown (it is only ever written, not read). Those only appear on memcard formats, as this is the only time that sector is overwritten (that sector of the memcard is purposely left blank by Sony).

[edcase]

Had not updated PCSX2 or had any issue with it for the past week, unchanged for this playthrough.
Mentioned 'documents/pcsx2/memcards/' folder was readonly because the errors felt access/permission related, but that folder looked intentional.
For the savestates and memcard to break in such a way i think chances are it could not write new info... it could attempt tho and garble the old. Also it could read, load and otherwise function. Odd how it slowly declined into that state over ~half an hour, same session had been running with no issues for a few hours.
Couldn't even open that .ini file with third party programs tho, so either it had garbled it or it wasn't pcsx2's fault but some freak local haze in my machine?
super. weird.

Interesting about the checksum message, good to hear that indeed is back to normal behaviour and that the warning is not directly related to my issues.