Internal Hard Drive Upgrade

[Deprave]

Sorry if this has been asked before (searching keeps giving me DB error).

I have Cobra USB and want to upgrade the internal drive. I've done a backup to an external drive using the built in PS3 HDD Backup. Is there anything special I need to do before putting the new drive in?

[BahumatLord]

as long as you backed up whatever you want to back up, then the only important thing you need to know is that the new drive needs to be unformatted meaning NOT FAT32 and NOT NTFS or any other system. it HAS to be blank. If you've used the drive before then you need to delete the partition and create a new unformatted one or you're going to get errors trying to install the firmware. If it is blank then just plug it in, turn on the ps3 and let the ps3 format the drive. You'll probably need your firmware handy to install from a USB drive

[Deprave]

Thanks BL, that worked like a charm. It was already a new drive so there wasn't any need to unallocate the disk space. I did need to have Cobra FW on a USB drive as well.

In case anyone finds this in the future, here is some more info:

My purchased PSN games, for the most part, no longer work (Tekken 5 Online, Crystal Defenders, FF: Tactics, and Castlevania: SotN), but one game did work (Scott Pilgram). These were games purchased long ago when I was able to still get on PSN.

It took 2 hours to back up 56 GB and another 2 to restore, so about 1hr per 28GB. You may want to delete some stuff and I recommend deleting mmCM in order to free up the space the "Split" games are taking up. That alone freed up 30 GB. I just happened to do that a few weeks prior to upgrade. You may want to also change the auto shutdown to never, I did just to not take a chance.

You do not need the Cobra dongle in the PS3. You need a USB drive with Cobra FW and another for the controller.

Double check your settings on the PS3 system settings after restoring, some didn't convert for me.

To unallocate (blank out) disk space prior to placing in the PC:
Hook the drive to a Windows PC
Open the Disk manager (Google it if not sure how)
Right click and delete all partitions on the drive
Entire drive should say "unallocated disk space"
You can now remove the drive and put in the PS3

[oldirtdog]

My purchased PSN games, for the most part, no longer work (Tekken 5 Online, Crystal Defenders, FF: Tactics, and Castlevania: SotN), but one game did work (Scott Pilgram).

well that sucks, after a whole lot of reading of threads from 2010 and 2011 there has got to be a way to upgrade an internal hard drive without losing access to pre purchased psn content, dlc, and gamesaves. i found a couple of threads saying that Rebug HDD Exchange Utility would work but what is unclear is if the clone process makes the extra space on the new hdd unusable if it is in fact a 1:1 drive clone. there are other threads which say you can reactivate psn content by signing in to psn (but of course we can't do that anymore). yet and still there are other threads which say to use the ps3 backup and restore utility but if i can't play purchased PSN games after the upgrade then i'll take a pass on that. i really don't care about the trophies as from what i have read even if you do get your old trophies back it's impossible to earn new trophies.

would it be possible to ftp the entire internal hdd to my computer and then ftp back the contents to a freshly formatted ps3 internal hdd? the only thing that is constant thru all the threads i have read is on a slim you need to have 3.55 firmware on a usb stick as slims only have a 16mb nand.

1tb 2.5 inch internal hdd's can be had for around $100.00 nowadays. anyone got any 2012 tips and or tricks to upgrading a hdd on a slim without losing anything except for trophies? also, i'd like to be able to upgrade to true blue 2.5 firmware after said hdd upgrade is complete and still have all of this work, just got it in the mail yesterday and these new games sure are nice!

regards, ol' dirty

found all the info i needed, thanks...