A little longish, so please bear with me.
So last night I was cooking tacos and preparing to watch Red Cliff via Blu-Ray on my PS3. I fired up the PS3, but wasn’t watching what was going on with it since I still had the TV tuned to The Office. I pulled out Assassin’s Creed III, popped in Red Cliff, and set the TV to the PS3. My custom wallpaper was up, but no menu icons appeared.
I did a hard reset. It told me the PS3 wasn’t shut of properly and that it would do a hard drive diagnostic. It completed but then resulted in the same issue: wallpaper is there, but no menu. So I looked the problem up online and someone else with the same issue was told to go into Safe Mode and select option 3.
I did so and the next time the PS3 fired up, it froze even before the custom wallpaper could come up. I called the PS3 troubleshooting line before touching it and they said the hard drive was likely corrupt and required a full system restore which would result in the loss of my game files, settings, downloads, everything.
I began the process of resetting the clock, but before I committed to the process, I shut the thing off. Surely there has to be a way to salvage my game files before completely reformatting?
Can anyone help? Is there a way to remove the HDD, connect it to a PC, and copy all the files?
Thanks in advance for answers.
I’m not sure of the cause of your problem, but a hard drive issue sounds at least plausible. If there is really something wrong with the drive itself it’s unlikely you’ll be able to access any of the data in that case regardless. I had a PS3 YLOD and sadly wasn’t able to get it back up and working despite two or three professional reflow attempts.
If you’ve been looking around you’ve probably noticed that each hard drive is encrypted to a particular PS3, so definitely don’t try to take out the drive and put it in a different machine; it’ll just wipe and reformat automatically upon starting. You might try swapping in a fresh drive to see if your machine can be at least salvaged back to a factory default. In theory, it might free up any snags and you would at least have some idea if it’s a hardware vs hard drive problem.
The repair guy at the store that attempted to fix mine told me he thought there was some sort of Linux/Ubuntu-based crack to would allow you to view and copy files onto another ps3’s drive; and while I don’t know shit about Linux, I was willing to put some effort into making anything work just to get my saved games. I don’t know if it’s legally fuzzy or what, but sadly despite some serious searching I wasn’t ever able to find any hint it even existed.
Bum luck, you just got kicked in the balls by Sony most likely. Next gen one of the main factors I will be looking at will be save game portability. I had sunk so much time into Borderlands, Mass Effect, Skyrim, Just Cause 2, etc, etc; just to have it all flushed by cheap solder. I still haven’t even started Mass Effect 3 single player because I wanted to finish another run through 2 so I’d have the full backstory. You might be pleased to hear there are websites where you can download saved games in various stages of completion, but- surprise, surprise- not something Sony has chosen to allow you to do. The final boot to the cojones is that mine took a crap about 2 weeks after Sony started offering online backup (at a faily steep price), and they already keep stuff like trophies server side anyways, so it was something well within their power to alleviate or eliminate, but they decided to hold out for bucks. Boo.