PS2 Will not boot when USB HDD is conntected.

Just today I recieved my Memor32 in the mail and promptly installed free McBoot and OPL to it. I did this with all intentions of playing my games from a USB HDD because my PS2 DVD drive no longer works. The HDD I have is an old Maxtor I dont remember the model number and the sticker has been gone for years. It was originally 300GB but the original drive crashed and I replaced it with an old 40GB IBM Deskstar that came out of an old iMac. The HDD is in perfect working order despite its age. I formatted it as NTFS then proceded to use the USBExtreme formatting tool, and it will not format the drive. I tried to just format the drive as FAT32 and copied a few games to it using the USBExtreme Windows client. However when this particular drive is attached to the PS2 the console will not boot. I get stuck at the free mcboot logo and it will not go past that to the main menu. IF I attach the drive after the PS2 has booted then nothing, not even uLaunchELF will detect the drive.

As an attempt at a temporary replacement I followed the same steps (NTFS>USB Extreme format>Copy images with USB EXtreme) with a 16GB flash drive and it works absolutely beautiful. The PS2 booted up just like normal, OPL listed the games without a second thought, and every game I tried fired right up. However I cannot keep this flash drive occupied for too long so this fix can only be temporary. I would really like to get this USB HDD working.

Any thoughts? could it be the physical drive? I have other drives I could put into the enclosure. OR could it be the enclosure itself? the Enclosure was purchased around 2005 I believe, but the drive I have in it was Manufactured in 2001, It is model number DTLA-307045 (not sure if thats important or not)

Lastly it is a FAT PS2

I am not new to console modding, but I am new to PS2 modding in particular, so any help would be greatly appreciated.

If you have another HD try format to fat32 and try the in closer again but if that don't work sounds like the USB drivers in OPL and uLE both incompatible with the
HD

Don't know what can be done about that :rolleyes:

You could try this with it thou

http://psx-scene.com/forums/ps2esdl/
another USB booter

OK, I swapped out the 40GB IBM drive for an 80GB Western Digital, now to PS2 will boot when the drive is attached, so thats one step in the right direction. however the drive still will not format. I start by formatting the drive as NTFS I then run the USB Extereme software to try to format the drive (even tried the cli version with ul_format . exe) and I get an error message that says "unable to map drive layout". Im going to try to just format the drive as FAT32 and see what happens. I tried leaving it as just NTFS and the PS2 could read it through uLaunchELF but OPL couldnt read it. Correct me if Im wrong but isnt the point of software like USB extreme to break up in game into parts so games larger than 4GB can fit on a FAT32 HDD?

All usb loaders only read fat and fa32
Yes but look in download section and get this it works better
USBUtil v2.00 Full [English version]

I tried USBUtil and still had no luck. Un fortunately I dont think I will get this drive to work. I instead tried a different drive all together. Its a USB powerd 320GB HDD, I was told that USB powerd drives wont work, but I gave it a shot and it worked out ok so far. I created a 120GB partition for the PS2 and so far so good. But I have had issues with games not loading sometimes, and I have to delete them and reload them to the drive.

Yea some usb powered HD do work hit miss but did you defrag first for OPL and the other loader you have to have continuous files

NO I didnt defrag. Is there a special program for this or should I just use the windows built in defrag?

Out of curiosity, you say you have an older fat PS2... Why don't you just get a network adapter for it and use the hard drive internally? It's faster than the slow USB 1.1 speeds and also has the benefit of being all integrated. Not sure where you're located, but eBay has network adapters fairly cheap.

I have looked into the network adapters, ebay has them for around $16 some even less. I have all intentions of getting myself one but I would also need to get a HDD to go with it. Once I started copying my collection of games over I realized 40GB or even 80GB wont cut it. I have 157GB worth of games, and I plan on heading over to my local used game shop to pick up some more on payday. I heard the network adapter can support up to a max of 250GB is this correct?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by nand11

I have looked into the network adapters, ebay has them for around $16 some even less. I have all intentions of getting myself one but I would also need to get a HDD to go with it. Once I started copying my collection of games over I realized 40GB or even 80GB wont cut it. I have 157GB worth of games, and I plan on heading over to my local used game shop to pick up some more on payday. I heard the network adapter can support up to a max of 250GB is this correct?

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Theoretically, the HDD can be as large as 2TB, however, not much success has been had with drives over 1.5TB from what I've read. You can also use the network loading capabilities of OPL to load the images off your computer as well. And yeah, they're around $10 plus a couple bucks for shipping off ebay. If GameStop has them, they're $5.99 according to the website. And as for needing a hard drive, you could always take the drive out of the external enclosure, though if it's USB powered, it's going to be a 2.5" hard drive, so you'd need an adapter.