Overview

At some point recently, Dolphin decided to corrupt my memory card file with some fairly old saves on it. I’m going to build/use GerbilSoft’s mcrecover to fix this.

I’m doing this on Oracle Linux 9, but the instructions should apply to most common flavors of Linux.

Building MCRecover

This is about as simple as it gets. I just cloned it and built it:

https://github.com/GerbilSoft/mcrecover.git
cd mcrecover
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make -j 8

This was on an OL9 system, where I’ve already built a bunch of other stuff, so you may need to install some dependencies to get the cmake step to succeed.

Copy Database Files to Appropriate Location

This bit took me a minute to figure out. If you’re not going to run a make install here, you need to copy the database XML files out of the source repo to a .config directory. I don’t generally run a bare make install on my systems, because then you’ve got software laying around that your package manager isn’t aware of.

If you don’t do this part, mcrecover will throw an error that says:

No GCN MemCard file databases were found.

Along with some info about where to copy the databases. It wasn’t immediately obvious where to acquire these databases, and the couple forum posts that I found about this were at least a decade old:

https://gbatemp.net/threads/gcn-memcard-recover.349406/

https://gbatemp.net/threads/gamecube-memory-card-corrupt.367902/

This is easily fixed, but I felt like it was worth a quick write-up, since it took me a bit to figure out. Anyway, you can fix this by doing the following before starting mcrecover:

cd <mcrecover_git_repo>
mkdir -p ~/.config/mcrecover/data
cp data/*.xml ~/.config/mcrecover/data/

At this point, you should be able to run mcrecover from the build directory, i.e. <mcrecover_git_repo>/build/bin/mcrecover, open your memory card image file, and attempt to recover saves from the image with the “Scan the memory card image for lost files” (magnifying glass) button at the top of the window.

Unfortunately, I went through all of this only to discover that there was nothing to be recovered from my corrupted memory card image.

A for effort anyway…