Help - all saves gone from memory card.

[rare_j]

I have an unchipped PS2 and use the exploit to load up HDLoader. Usually I use keylauncher but today I thought I'd give Ulaunchelf a try so I copied it to my memory card using a USB pendrive and Datel max memory manager.
It works fine - but now all the save games I had on my memory card are gone! Ulaunch elf cant see them, max memory manager can't see them, the PS2 browser cant see them; it says "no data" but it DOES report that there's only 300K free... which would be right if all my saves were on it!!!! We're talking about every saved game since I got my PS2 4 years ago, all gone!

What's happened? How can I get my saves back? Is there some sort of table-of-contents repair tool I can use? Help, I'm panicing.

[dlanor]

I have an unchipped PS2 and use the exploit to load up HDLoader. Usually I use keylauncher but today I thought I'd give Ulaunchelf a try so I copied it to my memory card using a USB pendrive and Datel max memory manager.
It works fine - but now all the save games I had on my memory card are gone! Ulaunch elf cant see them, max memory manager can't see them, the PS2 browser cant see them; it says "no data" but it DOES report that there's only 300K free... which would be right if all my saves were on it!!!! We're talking about every saved game since I got my PS2 4 years ago, all gone!

I feel your pain man. I've had similar losses myself.

It reminds me of the time my entire EMU collection got lost in a disk crash on my PC. Restoring all the EMUs was no big deal, though it took a lot of time (especially getting all settings normalized), but the real loss was all the gamesaves, representing thousands of hours of gameplay... Not to mention my 2MB FAQ on optimized FF8 playing (some of my best writing ever, now lost forever).

What's happened?

The Max Memory manager trashed your MC directory.
It's a problem with that software, reported many times before.

How can I get my saves back?

I'm not aware of any method to do that.

I believe that all the data content of the saves is still intact (as the sectors remain allocated, nothing should overwrite them), but rebuilding the directory structure is beyond me. I wouldn't even know where to begin.

Is there some sort of table-of-contents repair tool I can use? Help, I'm panicing.

I'm afraid your saves may indeed be lost for real.
I'm sorry, but I never heard of anyone being able to recover saves after a Max Memory trashing.

Best regards: dlanor

[rare_j]

Thanks for your advice. I did some extensive googling last night and was quite surprised by how little software there appears to be on the homebrew scene for repairing memory card data structures. I would thought it would be a well developed area. Oh well. I suspect the data on my memory card was highly fragmented after all this time which probably aggrevated the fault. I shall be careful with Datel max memory in future.

I gave some thought to getting a PS2 memory card adaptor for the PC and sifting through what data there is on there to see if I could rebuild anything, but on reflection it'd be a lot more fun and probably less time consuming to actually play and enjoy the games again.

The wierd thing is that Ulaunchelf boot.elf actually worked on the corrupted card, but it couldn't see anything on the card through the file browser, not even itself! Borrowed a mate's memory card and put it in slot 2 and Ulaunchelf could browse that fine. Thanks Datel...

Anyway... does Ulaunchelf have a feature to automatically start an elf on boot? With keylauncher I could set HDLoader to start automatically and I only ever saw keylauncher if i held start as it was booting.
Does Ulaunchelf do something similar?

[E P]

Anyway... does Ulaunchelf have a feature to automatically start an elf on boot? With keylauncher I could set HDLoader to start automatically and I only ever saw keylauncher if i held start as it was booting.
Does Ulaunchelf do something similar?

Yes, in the options it's the button setting named 'DEFAULT'. You can adjust the 'Default' Timeout timer in the startup settings menu.