New Hard Drive For Your PS3? Say Good Bye To Your Old One

[MarketTantrik]

New Hard Drive For Your PS3? Say Good Bye To Your Old One

 

From Pwnpatrol

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I just learned the hard way that once you install a new hard drive into a Playstation 3 that the old one will no longer be accepted and will need to be formatted to be used again.

 

Yesterday I bought a 250 gig Western Digital 2.5” hard drive for my PS3. I turned on my Playstation and attempted to backup my game saves and media (videos, mp3’s, pictures) through the system menu. I needed 41 gigs to do so but I did not have this space available on any removable media. No problem I thought, I would just connect the drive to my computer and copy it that way.

 

I put in the new hard drive, formatted it and then plugged the old one into my PC. Much to my surprise a PS3 formatted hard drive cannot be read by either Windows XP or Vista – apparently it uses some sort of proprietary file system, I’m assuming to prevent any sort of illegal copying.

 

Anyways, I put the old hard drive back in only to be told that I needed to format it to use it. WTF?! After installing the new hard drive, the original 80 gig hard drive that it came with was no longer accepted and needed to be reformatted to use again!

 

I called Sony tech support for help (after scouring the web and finding nothing) and they were no real help. The guy on the phone did suggest using Norton Ghost to clone the drive but of course the current version won’t work with removable drives (I tried using it through a 2.5 external enclosure). I also tried Acronis True Image but it did not work either.

 

So here I am with a new hard drive but withouth any of my game saves or media. I can live without the media but want my saves back! I am stuck with an 80 gig hard drive formatted to some Sony file system with all my data on it and I can no longer access it. This isn’t right. It’s my data, my game saves, my media and because I removed it from my PS3 and put in a new hard drive I can no longer access it. I want my data back!

 

Nowhere in the manual or on the internet (or even on the PS3 itself) was I warned that once I installed a new hard drive into my Playstation that my old one would become useless unless reformatted. Further to that, why would I have ever assumed that?

 

Does anyone have any suggestions? Anyone able to help me out? I haven’t reformatted the 80 gig hard drive so all the data is still there. Is there any way to read it on the PC so I can at least pull my save data?

 

Help!

 

This is so obviously a case of Sony treating us like pirates! From what I understand Sony has set the PS3 to only allow one hard drive to be used at a time so we can’t share/copy/use content on more than one PS3 at a time.Why else would they do this to me? There must be some sort of key stored in the system flash RAM that lets it know a different hard drive has been inserted. As much as this ticks me off what makes it even worse is that I cannot access the data on my PC.

 

Anyone else have this problem? Has anyone found a solution?

 

Edit: Ok, so I tried again just to make sure and yes, it still does not work. This is what happens. I also tried putting the old hard drive into my enclosure but the PS3 won’t even recognize it when I plug it in.

 

Yup, I suck. Lost all my COD4, Rockband, Half Life, DMC4, etc, saves.

 

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[THE DIRECTOR]

hahahaha, what an idiot, thats why the backup option is there. sorry, but 'backup' ...means 'backup'

if i can install a new hdd, then anyone can

[MarketTantrik]

^^ Can i hijack your place this weekend for some GT5P ?

[THE DIRECTOR]

see i would have said yes, as i got alot of editing to do, but the ps3 is now a AKP, we watched Casino Royale on the new projector in mini theater room, its gonna stay there for now, well, until the Tuesday.