Gaming nds bootstrap deleted all my save files for some reason!

[eternal_v]

last night i was playing my 3ds in bed and everything was all cool and awesome and I was 90% in de blob 2 on ds. I put it on the table and I fell asleep. Then I woke up and I was excited to finally finish the game after almost 7 months so I finished all my chores and everything really fast and I tried out 3ds bank since I had a lot of stuff and was thinking about organizing my games into separate folders. than i just added some more roms to my ds folder and made a few forwarders. popped it back in to play and all my save files were gone. i even checked through godmode9 and the folder was just empty except the new save file that nds bootstrap just created. please help i would really appreciate it. im currently copying all my stuff to my harddrive to run a h2testw test.

 

[Pk11]

You may want to try running data recovery of some sort before running h2testw, h2testw is effectively the same thing as a full 0 erase given that it writes to the whole drive to test it.

Though I'm not sure how well data recovery will work on DS saves given that they don't have a standardized header for it to look for...

Probably a decent chance that the SD is fake an that moving the files around caused it to lose some...

 

[eternal_v]

You may want to try running data recovery of some sort before running h2testw, h2testw is effectively the same thing as a full 0 erase given that it writes to the whole drive to test it.

Though I'm not sure how well data recovery will work on DS saves given that they don't have a standardized header for it to look for...

Probably a decent chance that the SD is fake an that moving the files around caused it to lose some...

yeah ill try that first. are there any programs you recommend?

 

[Sypherone]

h2testw doesnt check for filesystem errors, it only recognize if there faulty sectors and possibly overwrites some stuff.

Better run a filesystem error check with Powershell -> chkdsk X: /f (X - set your drive letter. Then check for the files or use recovery tool.
If no succes u might run a sektor error check with chkdsk /r. It will also try to recover information from corrupt sectors and will replace the sectors. Then check again for the files.

 

[Pk11]

yeah ill try that first. are there any programs you recommend?

I had luck with TestDisk one time when I got the whole partition corrupted on my card, in that case the FAT table was still there untouched though so it was able to just restore that... It's UI isn't great but it's at least free and I think it works fairly well if you can figure it out. Best thing to do first is probably to make a disk image of the whole thing, then run tests on copies of that to not risk losing anything if it is still there.

Edit: Yeah running chkdsk is probably good too, didn't think of that

 

[Pk11]

Another thing that may work is either opening the drive itself or a disk image of it in a hex editor and searching for something distinct in all De Blob 2 saves, you'll have to find some part of the save that is both relatively unique and consistent (ideally a magic number identifier at the start or so) but if there is something like that that may work well, then you can just extract it from the drive's data in the hex editor.

That's essentially what most data recovery software does, they just might not recognize the save if they don't know what to look for.

 

[Sypherone]

If you create a image, i dont how deep it goes. I think only readable data. On Linux exists dd wich perform a bitwise copy. So searched for something similar and found this site wich recommend some recoverytools based on raw data raw SD Card recovery.

OK, Windows 10 has since 2 years its own recovery tool on board Windows recovery for lost files

 

[Pk11]

If you create a image, i dont how deep it goes. I think only readable data. On Linux exists dd wich perform a bitwise copy. So searched for something similar and found this site wich recommend some recoverytools based on raw data raw SD Card recovery.

I think any decent disk image should just be a raw copy of the data on the drive, dd should definitely work. On Windows I think Win32DiskImager would work.

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I took a look at a de Blob 2 save and they seem to be 512 bytes and have the string HBEngine (hex 48 42 45 6E 67 69 6E 65) from the fourth through twelfth bytes of the file, so searching for HBEngine in a hex editor and copying the 512 bytes starting 4 before that would probably work if it gets any hits.

 

[eternal_v]

I think any decent disk image should just be a raw copy of the data on the drive, dd should definitely work. On Windows I think Win32DiskImager would work.

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I took a look at a de Blob 2 save and they seem to be 512 bytes and have the string HBEngine (hex 48 42 45 6E 67 69 6E 65) from the fourth through twelfth bytes of the file, so searching for HBEngine in a hex editor and copying the 512 bytes starting 4 before that would probably work if it gets any hits.

i’ll try both of these things out. It should work since all the actual data is in the drive sector.

If you create a image, i dont how deep it goes. I think only readable data. On Linux exists dd wich perform a bitwise copy. So searched for something similar and found this site wich recommend some recoverytools based on raw data raw SD Card recovery.

OK, Windows 10 has since 2 years its own recovery tool on board Windows recovery for lost files

Win32DiskImager actually reads every partition including unused and raw data so its basically the same as dd on linux.

 

[Sypherone]

I`ve just checked. Win32Diskimager writes/reads raw data to/from drives.

 

[eternal_v]

I think any decent disk image should just be a raw copy of the data on the drive, dd should definitely work. On Windows I think Win32DiskImager would work.

---

I took a look at a de Blob 2 save and they seem to be 512 bytes and have the string HBEngine (hex 48 42 45 6E 67 69 6E 65) from the fourth through twelfth bytes of the file, so searching for HBEngine in a hex editor and copying the 512 bytes starting 4 before that would probably work if it gets any hits.

turns out nothing worked, possibly since once i found out the save file was already overwritten with new data. BUT i have a ram dump from the night before is there anyway i could extract my save from that?

 

[Sypherone]

Just mount it, then you can do everything you want. Clone the image and mount it. There are a lot of recovery tools out there, you might try different to get one usefull. Maybe Testdisk or Aomei data recovery works.

 

[eternal_v]

Just mount it, then you can do everything you want

i dont think you can mount a ram dump.

 

[Sypherone]

If you cant mount the image by right klick and mounting it, write it win32disk imager to an SDCard. Else there is for sure a workaround or tool available for mount raw image on windows.

 

[Pk11]

i dont think you can mount a ram dump.

Did you try just searching for HBEngine in it in a hex editor? There's probably a decent chance it's in RAM given how small the full save is

 

[eternal_v]

Did you try just searching for HBEngine in it in a hex editor? There's probably a decent chance it's in RAM given how small the full save is

i checked, it has HBEngine but not the symbols before it present in every save so sadly it doesnt look like my save is salvageable unless the devs add a feature to replace the current ram with a ram dump from the sd card. probably just a sign for me to invest in a dedicated flashcart like i was thinking of doing

 

[Pk11]

i checked, it has HBEngine but not the symbols before it present in every save so sadly it doesnt look like my save is salvageable unless the devs add a feature to replace the current ram with a ram dump from the sd card. probably just a sign for me to invest in a dedicated flashcart like i was thinking of doing

Hmm, did you try just copying from the HBEngine onwards into an existing save? Might be worth a shot at least... It could well be stored in a different structure in RAM though and that's just the string literal or such though...

Unfortunately it's a trickier to restore a RAM dump than to make one, save states are something I'd like to add but I just don't really know how, it's 100% possible (though not necessarily 100% reliable) given a few flashcards can do it, but I'm not really sure how it works...

It's very unlikely a separate flashcard would've made a difference here besides maybe the fact that you wouldn't have been moving as many files, it's most likely a faulty SD card. Even cards from good brands go bad sometimes, SD cards just aren't very reliable storage mediums... nds-bootstrap is almost certainly not at fault, it's not even able to delete saves and I haven't heard of this happening.

One thing I just thought of since you said "organizing my games into separate folders", you did move the save files right? The save file location is dependent on the ROM location, not any one fixed place, so if your save is just still at "sd:/roms/DS/saves" or so you'll need to move it.