Help - Memory card broken?

[LadyCyclone]

The other day my brother told me that his old PS1 was chipped (Whoopeee!) meaning I can now play burned versions of Suikoden 2, 3 and all the rest without spending £££ on them. I tried to play Suikoden 2 and it wouldn't work; memory card symbol came up; I fiddled around a bit and nothing was happening. Pressed the memory card button a few times, still nothing happened. Found out later that it's actually his other ps1 that was chipped, not the one I'm currently playing on!

Anyway, I stuck the real version of Suikoden 1 in - been playing about 20 hours worth already - only to be told that there was no saved data!! I tried again; still no saved data! Basically, I somehow managed to lose my saved game when I was trying the burned discs, or so it seems! Does ANYONE have any idea how this has happened or how I can get it back??

Lemmy's edit: Clarified thread title

[Aerolithe Lion]

Do you mean PS1 or PS2? And it sounds like it could be the memory card

[LadyCyclone]

PS1; for some reason the Suikoden 1 that I had bought a while ago won't play on the PS2 so I played it on the PS1. Anyway, the memory card had been working fine for Suikoden 1 - up until the point I tried to stick the burned version of Suikoden 2 into the PS1 and there were a couple of 'memory card' options, I was randomly pressing stuff trying to get it to work but of course it didn't; now my data from Suikoden 1 is lost!!

[Pyriel]

Pull up the memory card viewer and see if the blocks show up as corrupt, or if the memory card is just blank. I'm pretty sure there was a format option in the PS1's viewer that would even work with formatted cards that contained data, and you might have accidentally used it when you were punching buttons.

[Hirathien]

Was it a third-party memory card? I used one of those and it would frequently format my memorycard at it's leasure.

[Antimatzist]

Pull up the memory card viewer and see if the blocks show up as corrupt, or if the memory card is just blank. I'm pretty sure there was a format option in the PS1's viewer that would even work with formatted cards that contained data, and you might have accidentally used it when you were punching buttons.

Yeah I often accidently formatted my Memory Card in the past, even an official one. My thrid party memory card needed to be formatted from time to time, too.

[Eltaire]

Was it a third-party memory card? I used one of those and it would frequently format my memorycard at it's leasure.

I found this too. Any memory card that I used that wasn't an official Sony product would eventually lose its ability to retain save data. =[

[Lemmy Claypool]

I've had the same two PSX memory cards since I first got my PlayStation, both are third party and both work fine to this day. Never been formatted either.

[Pyriel]

Depends on the brand, and you can always get lucky in any case. However, the build quality on third-party cards is generally poor. If you open some of them up, it looks like they were designed by no one and built by somebody in the middle stages of Parkinson's.

[LadyCyclone]

OK ... it's not a Sony memory card, it's some standard PS1 card that I bought in a rush to play the game. Judging by the responses here, it looks like I've lost the whole thing!

[Hirathien]

Try to get a "new" memorycard, should be available without being cheated on tons of cash.

[Eltaire]

If you own the game, then you could always emulate it on your PC?