Memory Cart Corruption

[tempest]

I went to play PD Zwei today but when the game started up, it said it couldn't load my save file. I went into the memeory management screen and the file was still there but so were all these oddly named files, like yyyy that took up more space than is available on the cart. In fact the cart seemed to think it had millions of bytes left to fill (last time I checked it was nearly full). Having had corrupt files before, I deleted them all. This didn't change the read out so I reinserted the cart and it came up with the same reading.

Unpeterbed, I started up Zwei only to find my save had been wiped. I played through the game but when I finished, the game said it couldn't save. In the memory manager, my old Zwei save file had been overwritten by a brand new one with no play time registered.

I'm confused. Can anyone tell me what's going on? I lost my original Christmas NiGHTS save a few months ago too. Is the cart completely stuffed?

[zyrobs]

The cart slot on the Saturn is poor and sometimes one or two pins don't connect properly. This is enough for some areas to be unreadable or unwritable, which can result in corruption if you try to save on it or try deleting anything from it.

As you have since tried deleting and saving on the cart, it is very likely that whatever was on the cart is now toast. You can still recover the cart itself, just clean all of the cart connectors, and then format it from the memory manager.

[tempest]

How sure are you of that? I put the cart in my original Saturn and there are no courupt save files and it loads and saves off the cart with no problem. It still thinks it has a kabillion-jillion bytes free though.

I'm thinking of getting an action replay cart and transferring my saves to that (those that will fit on the internal memory at least) then format the memory cart and see how that goes. I don't want to lose all my important save games.

Would having saves from games from multiple regions on the same cart perhaps cause the issue?

[zyrobs]

The memory cart has a file system that is very susceptible to damage. The file manager only checks the header of each save to see if it is there, it doesn't check if every block the save takes up is there or not. Or if the blocks are there and have valid data.
It might not have the entire cart corrupted, only some saves.
I don't know the exact algorithm the machine checks for free space, but it's also possible that some junk pattern was written that it interprets as a free block.

Having multiple region saves won't corrupt the cart, but it is possible that some saves are not compatible with others and overwrite each other. Scorcher does that and it took me so long to figure it out.

[tempest]

Thanks. I've had issues with it writing junk data in the past and deleting the data fixed the issue. I'll try get the data off the cart ASAP just in case.