Fat PS3 stuck in loop

I had a 640gb in it when this happened and I took it out and tried the 80gb that came with it and no luck. Both hard drives work fine on pc.

I'm having a similar issue. My hard drive said it was corupt the other day, and kept being in a loop of restoring. So I took hard drive out and completely wiped it through PC. Now when I try and reinstall through PS3 system menu, it says The Data is corrupted. (8002f2c5) when I put in USB stick with update file on. I've tried with two different USB sticks so don't think it's that.

I'm at a loss here, I'm wondering if I should just trash this thing and buy a new one. Surely someone on here has had this sort of problem before, guessing it's a hardware issue. Someone have any ideas on what I can do?

what model is it?

CECHL01

Have you tried the update on a Disc?

the ps3 won't boot, can't get game discs to work.

I guess you meant burning the update to a disc so I tried that and it still didn't work, installs 100% then reboots back to the screen that says to install 3.55 or later firmware.

Ah right, that worked on mine so thought I'd just suggest it. Can't think of anything else, sorry

Thanks for the help anyway. I am thinking it's probably a hardware issue, I was just hoping that maybe someone on here knew what it could be, in hopes that I could fix it without getting a new system.