Xbox360 Save Recovery Follow-up
So, just finished recovering my for Resident Evil 5 (RE5), Devil May Cry 4 (DMC4), Mass Effect 2 (ME2). Mass Effect 1 is proving to be annoying, along with the orange box, but it still looks -possible- just annoying.
Now that I've recovered a few more saves I can say the method I previously suggested will work for most games, if my experiance with these games is any indicator. As a recap the method I previously suggested is:
So thankfully ME2 and DMC4 proved to not be difficult at all. The above method worked perfectly without modification.
Resident Evil 5 was almost perfect, the name of the save file is savedata.bin, which is also the name of the file that is contained within the save file, basically just don't be tricked, restore the fileXXXX.bin, not the file extract_360.py extracts (also named savedata.bin ).
Now as I mentioned the orange box and mass effect 1 had some strange things, or annoying I guess. Orange box creates one save file for each game in the orange box (Half Life, Half Life Episodes, Portal, and Team Fortress, though I never played team fortress so I don't have that save). They are all ~20 megs, now remember up top I only copy 4 megs out of the xbox image file after the CON ? Well thats a problem here. It would appear something similar is going on with mass effect 1. There was one game save that was only 432kb (this is a pretty average size for the game saves I've seen so far, RE5 was the smallest at about 22kb), but no matter what I tried it always showed up as corrupted data on the xbox360. The second ME1 save shows up fine, but the game can't load it, and I assume this means I haven't copied enough out of the xbox image file. I do plan on trying to restore these two at at some point, but they aren't top on my priorities list. Playing the ME2 Lair of the Shadow Broker DLC is ;) .
Now the astute reader would be pointing out at this juncture "Hey, you also had Assassin's Creed 1 and Gears of War 1 game saves". That reader would be correct, but I was unable to find any traces of those saves on the hard drive, and I honestly don't care. I don't play on replaying AC1, and GoW is a good game, but the game save doesn't buy you anything, and the achievements are tied to the xbox live account, so no loss there.
Thus ends the harrowing adventure in restoring xbox game saves from a formatted hard drive (For the most part at least). I hope you all have created backups of your game saves so you never have to go through this. If you do, I hope these ramblings prove useful!
Now that I've recovered a few more saves I can say the method I previously suggested will work for most games, if my experiance with these games is any indicator. As a recap the method I previously suggested is:
- put the game in and start a new game, get to a save point and let the game create the directory structure it wants to (I have no idea how to create them manually, and really, I've got the game anyway so why waste the effort?).
- Look through all the pngs the file finding python script I posted previous created for the game images you want (they're all pretty clear, and will be in chronological order).
- Once you find a file you want to store, note the file number, and find the fileXXXX.bin and open it in your favorite text editor (I like notepad++).
- Look for the second instance of the string 'CON ' (without the ', and there is 4 characters, the last is a space)
- Delete the rest of the file starting with the second 'CON ', this is kind of a kludge, but basically if you remember the script grabs the next 4 megs from the xbox360 hard drive image from the 'CON ' string, so we're just trimming our file to just before where the next one starts. If this doesn't make sense don't worry, it doesn't really matter in most cases
- Now plug your xbox360 hard drive in to your computer
- Fire up xport360
- Navigate to partition 3, the saved data folder, the first folder should be your xbox live profile (if you have multiple you'll have to count the number of saves you have to figure out which is yours...but I only have one!)
- Find the game you're interested (the plain english names should be there next to the hex directory names)
- Open that directory, find the name of the file inside (most games should only have one, ffxiii has one for each save)
- Now this isn't necessary, I don't think, but I like to do this for consistency's sake, rename your truncated fileXXXX.bin the same as the save in that directory
- Drag the file to restore in to the xport360 window
- Party time! (check to see if it worked), you can do this through the my xbox => system settings => memory => storage device => games, inside each game it will list the saves, or Corrupted Data if the transfer didn't work. You can ask me questions but I can't promise I'll be able to help in every case =(
So thankfully ME2 and DMC4 proved to not be difficult at all. The above method worked perfectly without modification.
Resident Evil 5 was almost perfect, the name of the save file is savedata.bin, which is also the name of the file that is contained within the save file, basically just don't be tricked, restore the fileXXXX.bin, not the file extract_360.py extracts (also named savedata.bin ).
Now as I mentioned the orange box and mass effect 1 had some strange things, or annoying I guess. Orange box creates one save file for each game in the orange box (Half Life, Half Life Episodes, Portal, and Team Fortress, though I never played team fortress so I don't have that save). They are all ~20 megs, now remember up top I only copy 4 megs out of the xbox image file after the CON ? Well thats a problem here. It would appear something similar is going on with mass effect 1. There was one game save that was only 432kb (this is a pretty average size for the game saves I've seen so far, RE5 was the smallest at about 22kb), but no matter what I tried it always showed up as corrupted data on the xbox360. The second ME1 save shows up fine, but the game can't load it, and I assume this means I haven't copied enough out of the xbox image file. I do plan on trying to restore these two at at some point, but they aren't top on my priorities list. Playing the ME2 Lair of the Shadow Broker DLC is ;) .
Now the astute reader would be pointing out at this juncture "Hey, you also had Assassin's Creed 1 and Gears of War 1 game saves". That reader would be correct, but I was unable to find any traces of those saves on the hard drive, and I honestly don't care. I don't play on replaying AC1, and GoW is a good game, but the game save doesn't buy you anything, and the achievements are tied to the xbox live account, so no loss there.
Thus ends the harrowing adventure in restoring xbox game saves from a formatted hard drive (For the most part at least). I hope you all have created backups of your game saves so you never have to go through this. If you do, I hope these ramblings prove useful!