Unable to read save.

[Tommi]

Hi everyone, I'm having a disaster and possibly also a nervous breakdown ;-;

I booted up my New Leaf digital copy today and everything seemed normal, my town looked fine on the main menu:

The problem is when I continue as any of my characters, it begins to load then this error pops up and destroys my life... "Unable to save. Your game will exit without saving" :

After that, it boots back to the main menu with a whole new town:

And I'm then greeted with this error which sends me over the edge "Unable to read save data. Turn off the power and reinsert the game card". It doesn't make any sense since I'm using the digital copy:

I've had the same save file since June 2013 and I don't want to lose it. I can see my town is still there, but I can't seem to load my save. I haven't done anything to my SD card, not dropped or knocked my N3DS, it's just randomly done this. It doesn't say anything about the data being corrupted so I'm kind of holding out hope that it can be recovered. Any help would be appreciated.

 

[Chrystina]

oh my gosh... yeah it doesn't say corrupt, thats really odd. i've never seen this error before.

im sorry i cant help ;_; just wishingn you best of luck it's not corrupt/gone.

 

[Tommi]

oh my gosh... yeah it doesn't say corrupt, thats really odd. i've never seen this error before.

im sorry i cant help ;_; just wishingn you best of luck it's not corrupt/gone.

Ugh I know, right? ;-;

I've tried searching but I can't find anything about this error message but I can't be the only person to have experienced it, surely?

 

[Dae Min]

That's terrible ;; I sincerely hope that everything will be alright and you can reenter your town. From what I've read on the forums, the digital copy is very prone to data corruption and other errors like it.

Worse comes to worse, you start over with a new town and new villagers, but more often than not the second town becomes better than the original. ^^

 

[ladylou]

That's really horrid Tommi, hope you can manage to get it to work! I've never seen that error before so I'm not much help I'm afraid, but I wanted to say how awful I feel for you and that I'm keeping my fingers crossed you can get it to work again

 

[Chrystina]

I did some google searching for you and came up with absolutely nothing. my advice would be to turn off your 3ds completely, wait a few mins, take out the sd card and insert it again. wait like 5-10 mins and turn it back on. maybe the sd card is lose or something idk D: best of luck.

but yeah, digital versions are very prone to coruption. it just happened with mine. although i thought the game always came up with a error that said corrupt, not this weird unable to save error youre getting..

if worse comes to worse, maybe try nintendo support? its a long shot but better than nothing ;-;

 

[LinkToTheWorld]

I've seen something similar before with the digital copy, I've known people have lots of problems with it.
Unfortunately I don't think there's much you can do, in my friends case they bought the cartridge and started over. I didn't know much about it at the time as I wasn't playing it myself then
I'm so sorry
I do hope there's a way to fix it x

 

[Punchyleaf]

Have you attempted to go to the eshop, hit redownloadable software, find ACNL, and hit the little "repair" button? It's an option, other than that, it seems your save may be corrupt in the fact that you can't access it

 

[Quill]

I can't find any information on it either :/ Definitely try contacting Nintendo support, but it looks like you might have to start over. I'm so sorry.

 

[Belle of Pripyat]

I have a bad feeling that it actually is corrupted. I'm sorry.

 

[Punchyleaf]

Nintendo support can't help much with digital games unfortunately. You'll most likely be told to redownload

 

[Tommi]

I did some google searching for you and came up with absolutely nothing. my advice would be to turn off your 3ds completely, wait a few mins, take out the sd card and insert it again. wait like 5-10 mins and turn it back on. maybe the sd card is lose or something idk D: best of luck.

Thanks, I tried that earlier but no change, still getting those damn errors ;-;

Have you attempted to go to the eshop, hit redownloadable software, find ACNL, and hit the little "repair" button? It's an option, other than that, it seems your save may be corrupt in the fact that you can't access it

Unfortunately that didn't work but thanks for the suggestion, I completely forgot about that option.

 

[Eline]

I don't know if this is even possible but maybe you could transfer the data on your sd card to another sd card? I'm not sure if this will harm you game or anything though... I'm just trying to help!

 

[AnimalCrossingPerson]

I'm using the digital copy

That's the problem! Lol, jokes, jokes. Um... take your SD card out and make sure the switch on the side of it is in the opposite direction of the arrow with the word 'lock' written to the side of it. This makes the card read-only which could be an issue due to the game having to write data to save, trigger Resetti etc.

If that doesn't work, I have absolutely no clue. :/

 

[Tommi]

That's the problem! Lol, jokes, jokes. Um... take your SD card out and make sure the switch on the side of it is in the opposite direction of the arrow with the word 'lock' written to the side of it. This makes the card read-only which could be an issue due to the game having to write data to save, trigger Resetti etc.

If that doesn't work, I have absolutely no clue. :/

The N3DS uses microSD cards which dont have that switch on the side so that is not the issue.

I just don't know what to do... The fact that I can see my town on the main menu is stopping me from deleting and starting again, but I guess it really is lost... ;-;

At least if I start it again I can still visit it with the Dream Suite so that's a silver lining I suppose.

 

[AnimalCrossingPerson]

The N3DS uses microSD cards which dont have that switch on the side so that is not the issue.

I just don't know what to do... The fact that I can see my town on the main menu is stopping me from deleting and starting again, but I guess it really is lost... ;-;

At least if I start it again I can still visit it with the Dream Suite so that's a silver lining I suppose.

Ugh! It bugs me how it won't let you play despite your town being visible. Could be some anti-cheat protection... have you tried any map editing or anything like that lately?

 

[matt]

Remove the game card and sd card
Try defragmenting the SD card or error check chkdsk and see if there are bad sectors on the memory card

 

[Tommi]

Ugh! It bugs me how it won't let you play despite your town being visible. Could be some anti-cheat protection... have you tried any map editing or anything like that lately?

Nope, I don't use any cheats, I've always played legit. It bugs me too because I can see it, if it was deleted because of corruption I would probably be able to move on easier, but I'm not going to delete the save when I can still SEE my town.

Remove the game card and sd card
Try defragmenting the SD card or error check chkdsk and see if there are bad sectors on the memory card

I've got the digital copy so I can't remove that but I'm definitely gonna try this tomorrow, thanks!

 

[AnimalCrossingPerson]

Remove the game card and sd card
Try defragmenting the SD card or error check chkdsk and see if there are bad sectors on the memory card

They have a digital copy.

SD cards use flash memory and therefore have a much lower number of writes than regular hard drives before failing and due to not having to move a physical head, don't really need defragmenting. Really, it's not a great idea and might interfere with any protection the 3DS has against hacks and such although the latter is unlikely to be fair.

Chkdsk might do something. Here's a link so this post actually achieved something: http://forums.androidcentral.com/am...guide-using-chkdsk-fix-corrupted-sd-card.html

 

[Spooky.]

I don't know if this will help any or even work, but did you try hitting 'new save file' instead of using an existing character? Since your game doesn't have to save to load (and doesn't save until after you get your tent and all) maybe it can be a bit of a workaround somehow?