Memory Card Corruption?

[Konan]

Ok first of all I NEVER played online mode so I don't know how this is coming up, but I played a level 1 and got her to level 10, I had God/Abilities equipped 2 of the same one if that caused it. But after that I got the memory card corruption notice and it said quit without saving, it said it was going to delete everything on my memory card but in the end it never did. I logged onto another character and quit game and it saved fine. What could of caused this?

[Konan]

well my memory card is useless now -_- all the time I spent on it just to have something corrupt it.
Everything me and my friend worked to get is gone now... she died some time ago, and wanted me to have her character because I was close to her... so this is just great, now I have nothing and I screwed up that.

Everythign on my Memory card is deleted, I don't understand how it got corrupted I didn't do anything to catch a virus or corruption. What caused this?

[Garrett_TD23]

It screwed me too a while back. I had 3 characters over level 140. It's not your fault, it's happened to many people over the years. The best and only thing I can think of doing to fight against it is to "dupe" your rares and put it as a backup on another memory card.

[blace]

You have to understand that memory cards from that era ran on a tiny battery. Unlike memory cards now that use flash, battery powered memory cards and cartridges were common at the time, before the full fledged use of flash based memory sticks and tiny SD cards.

[Konan]

You have to understand that memory cards from that era ran on a tiny battery. Unlike memory cards now that use flash, battery powered memory cards and cartridges were common at the time, before the full fledged use of flash based memory sticks and tiny SD cards.

im honestly... just, idk what to thinko or feel or whatever
im probably going to save up money for PSO2 I guess.
god I worked so hard on this game just to have it all disppear... same with all my other games. I honestly more upset that all the memories I had with friends/family and my gf playing these games and the saved data we kept for memories is gone.

sometimes you win sometimes you lose and sometimes yo uget screwed over... thats life I guess.

[T0m]

battery powered memory cards and cartridges were common at the time, before the full fledged use of flash based memory sticks and tiny SD cards.

Gamecartridges did have batteries for storage. Gamecube memory cards do not.

[blace]

Gamecartridges did have batteries for storage. Gamecube memory cards do not.

They didn't? I dissected a memory card before and found a battery, but it was a third party brand.

Gameboy cartridges and some GBA cartridges used a battery to keep their saves.

As for PSO2, just download the character creator and run the compatibility test to see if your system can handle it.

[Konan]

Gamecartridges did have batteries for storage. Gamecube memory cards do not.

oh, idk maybe I just overplayed the game or something... ill put away my PSO Episode I and II for a few months to give the disc a break and ill replace my GC within that time so maybe it will be all better.

[T0m]

Don't overthink it. Memory cards do go corrupt randomly. Like any consumer product they can fail without a direct cause. Third party memory cards tend to corrupt more often than Nintendo's own cards, so if that was what you were using then you had an increased chance of corruption.

In any case, the only reasonable way you could have corrupted your save was to cut the power (or turn off the Cube) while the game was saving. The amount you played has no effect on it. Nothing you do in game (except turning the Cube off while it is saving) causes corruption.


They didn't? I dissected a memory card before and found a battery, but it was a third party brand.
As far as I know these memory cards are basically modified SD cards.

[Konan]

Don't overthink it. Memory cards do go corrupt randomly. Like any consumer product they can fail without a direct cause. Third party memory cards tend to corrupt more often than Nintendo's own cards, so if that was what you were using then you had an increased chance of corruption.

In any case, the only reasonable way you could have corrupted your save was to cut the power (or turn off the Cube) while the game was saving. The amount you played has no effect on it. Nothing you do in game (except turning the Cube off while it is saving) causes corruption.


As far as I know these memory cards are basically modified SD cards.

Well I did transfer A LOT of stuff over at one time, probably saved 8-10 times within 20 or less minutes. So if this could cause it I screwed myself over...

[VioletSkye]

There were 3 "official" memory cards released in the US for the GC, the 59 which held roughly .5 MB of data, the 251 which held 2MB of data and the 1019 which held 8MB of data. The number refers to the amount of "blocks" available to store date (although all 3 cards had 5 more blocks per card to hold system data so they were in reality 64, 256 and 1024.) It was believed that the 1019 cards were generally less reliable and more prone to corruption because Nintendo made those cards outside of the officially documented specifications for the GC and also utilized compression. I also remember something specifically about Sega using the cards in a way that Nintendo hadn't predicted but worked fine within the other cards (59 and 251) because they were made to spec. That's not to say that someone will for sure have issues with a 1019 card, but it was apparently a known issue. And it also goes without saying that it was also possible to get a corrupted save on the 59 and 251 cards.

A major problem with 3rd party cards had to do with the compression the cards used to store save files. PSO was EXTREMELY!!! picky in how the save files needed to be stored. If a save wasn't written back to the memory card in the exact spot that it thought it should go then you basically ended up with a corrupt save file and that was especially true of the cards that boosted "huge" (for the time anyway) storage space.

Found some good info on the 1019 cards from Nintendo's own website: Nintendo GameCube Memory Card 1019 (http://www.nintendo.com/consumer/memorycard1019.jsp)

**Also I found several posts/articles about the 1019 cards having issues when used in a Wii.**

[T0m]

[...]

Thanks for the correction and clarification. You're probably the only person who can call himself awesome to the max and still be too modest. :-P

[Konan]

There were 3 "official" memory cards released in the US for the GC, the 59 which held roughly .5 MB of data, the 251 which held 2MB of data and the 1019 which held 8MB of data. The number refers to the amount of "blocks" available to store date (although all 3 cards had 5 more blocks per card to hold system data so they were in reality 64, 256 and 1024.) It was believed that the 1019 cards were generally less reliable and more prone to corruption because Nintendo made those cards outside of the officially documented specifications for the GC and also utilized compression. I also remember something specifically about Sega using the cards in a way that Nintendo hadn't predicted but worked fine within the other cards (59 and 251) because they were made to spec. That's not to say that someone will for sure have issues with a 1019 card, but it was apparently a known issue. And it also goes without saying that it was also possible to get a corrupted save on the 59 and 251 cards.

A major problem with 3rd party cards had to do with the compression the cards used to store save files. PSO was EXTREMELY!!! picky in how the save files needed to be stored. If a save wasn't written back to the memory card in the exact spot that it thought it should go then you basically ended up with a corrupt save file and that was especially true of the cards that boosted "huge" (for the time anyway) storage space.

Found some good info on the 1019 cards from Nintendo's own website: Nintendo GameCube Memory Card 1019 (http://www.nintendo.com/consumer/memorycard1019.jsp)

**Also I found several posts/articles about the 1019 cards having issues when used in a Wii.**

Thanks for the info, ill just use a 59/251 space card from now on. Well if I play again, ill just take a break for awhile to calm down, probably try PSO2 then ill go back to PSO Episode I and II.

[VioletSkye]

Thanks for the correction and clarification. You're probably the only person who can call himself awesome to the max and still be too modest. :-P
LOL, Thanks!! :-P

Although I have to admit, the title isn't any kind of self proclamation of my coolness and until today, it never dawned on me that people might take it that way lol. It was actually taken from an episode of Futurama in which an "80's" guy gets unfrozen and he and Fry take over Planet Express. Found a clip :)


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0ll5yizGLo

[gigawuts]

Interesting, so this might be just an issue with how the data was written back to the memory card and not actually being corrupted? That explains why PSO data corrupts so frequently (Along with being one of the only GC games to warrant so many hundreds of hours of gameplay for so many players).

In theory this could actually be fixed with a program as well, couldn't it? It would just require so much detailed work that the time has long since passed for anyone to care enough to do it.

Actually, I've heard of a certain server software backing up a memory card's save file to be restored later (In an illegitimate way). I suppose that would be able to do this if someone broke down the whole save file structure and worked out a way to fix it, which would be...a whole lot of work.

Either way, great information. This answers a lot of questions I've had over the years, thanks a lot for posting this! And again, sorry about the whole thing Konan :(

[VioletSkye]

That's what makes so many of those "corruptions" so frustrating. As you mentioned, the actual save file/s are 100% fine and would load no problem if Sega had not implemented a check system to make sure the save file/s where being read from an exact location on the card, most likely to stop cheating/"duping" (there's a word I haven't used in a LONG time lol.) The 59 and 251 cards did not use compression and the blocks that stored save files were static (meaning their location/address on the memory card never changed.)

Back in the day, there were several programs that you could use to backup your memory card to your pc and some of us even had the USB memory cards that allowed you to save either single save files or the entire card (basically creating an image) to your pc. The interesting thing about the USB Memory card was that the earlier versions of the software that came with the card, were not specific about where the save files got written back to and so saving your PSO files to your pc and then restoring them usually resulted in the files being "corrupt." However if you chose to backup the entire card and restore it, the PSO save files worked just fine. This was fixed in later versions of the software.

On a side note, I also remember each time you "formatted" a memory card, it created a unique format ID (which was included in the PSO save files) and if you tried to restore a PSO save file back to a newly formatted memory card, the ID would be different and thus the file/s would be considered "corrupt" by PSO even though the actual file itself was perfectly fine and it was being written to the correct address/location. This was easy to test by formatting the USB Card and then trying to restore the individual save files back to the card using the updated software, which always resulted in "corruption." However, if you then chose to restore the entire card image back to the USB card (which also restored the format ID) you could then recopy those individual save files back over and it worked no problem. The only "true" corruptions occurred when the save file failed to write back correctly/completely to the memory card such as instances where you turned the GC off while the game was saving or during saves/double saves when playing online.

[gigawuts]

Yeah, this server software I'm talking about ONLY works with official Nintendo cards - and can only restore a save to a card with the same ID. AFAIK neither of those were actually required, just limitations imposed by the creator. Probably specifically to combat (easy) cheating and duping.

This would be a really neat project if someone were to get bored. Considering the Wii has apparent online capabilities these days... Hey, maybe someone will eventually do it. It sounds entirely possible, if they can crack the save file structure and figure out how to rearrange it. Hopefully that much stays consistent between save files, and Sega weren't huge dicks about making each save file randomly different. I really would not put it past them.

[osbourne]

It's possible to backup Gamecube memory card saves directly to the PC. You still might be screwed if the card ID changes though as far as restoring goes, but I've seen a program that claims to be able to "fix" PSO saves so they can be moved onto other cards.

[lizazenith]

Corruption of memory card is possible if your card gets infected with virus. It can delete all the important videos which are stored in it and makes them inaccessible. If you are also facing data loss situation and wants to restore all the lost files without any hassle then you can make use of MOV Recovery Software. It is an advanced software which is designed to help the users and recover all the deleted files. It is safe and secure software which provides money back guarantee offer if it will not work properly. So download the software without making any delay.

Read More Information:- http://www.mov-recovery.com/complete-tutorial-guidelines-to-restore-mpeg-files-of-android-phone-after-corruption-of-memory-card

[gigawuts]

That bot's post was frighteningly on topic, shame PSO doesn't rely on video files for its saves.

[Konan]

Unfortenatly it does seem spot on, but honestly im doing ok now and ill take my losses.