PSN Temporary Reactivation!

**gundamwfan** · 10-29-2010,11:36 AM

Good morning/afternoon everybody. Man I love this scene. I love comgenie's file manager most of all. And you want to know why? I'll tell you why.

Yesterday I switched out hard drives on my 160GB Drake model PS3. The one with only 16MB of flash. When you do that, even with the HDD backup and restore, it carts over your DLC but not the activation. The activation keys supposedly were stored in nand and blah blah blah...wrong! WRONG WRONG WRONG!

There's a little file in the exdata folder of the home directory called "act.dat" and it has all the activation info for all the dlc you've purchased. I noticed after comparing the new drive after backup with the files I copied over before I switched out and guess what...act.dat was missing. After I copied over the act.dat file, everything worked like a charm, INCLUDING all my rock band DLC that would've required reactivation and all my DLC Games! So share the news with your friends, for those that didn't know, that act.dat file is golden for DLC and could hopefully lead to bypassing activation at some point in the future. Pass it on!

Update: DLC is seen in Non JB'd mode, and won't run without activation. But IN JB mode, DLC runs without a hitch. perhaps with some editing, this could lead to running unlicensed DLC? I don't know.

MORE GOOD INFO:

Originally Posted by Cyberskunk

Temporarily Reactivate Your PSN Content with a Backup of 'act.dat'

I've figured out you can temporarily reactivate your PSN Content and it is as simple as transferring your backup of..

'act.dat' or the entire 'exdata' folder (Depends on the situation)

to this folder on the PS3..

'dev_hdd0\home\00000001\exdata'

It will be reactivated until you restart the PS3 again..

So go and backup the 'exdata' folder now if you haven't already!!..

So there you go guys.. I'll try to keep adding to it.. Hope I’ve helped..

P.S. I edited and repacked 'PS3 FTP Server' and 'Back-Up Manager' so both have PS1 Disc ID's.. Unfortunately I cannot post them but I have given them to a couple of people and what they do with them is up to them so they may pop up somewhere.. They are 'NINJA FTP' and 'Stealth BUM'..

If anyone has the intention of reproducing this post in part or in full please credit the original author.

Last edited by Cyberskunk on 09-22-2010 at 07:35 AM.
Reason: Added PSN Temporary Reactivation

Cyberskunk's Guide: 'HOW TO' - FTP PS3 Games to PC, Clean 'pushlist' Files and More (via) Maxconsole

**Xeauron** · 10-29-2010,11:58 AM

Thanks for the info

Very noted for when I do my switch out eventually!

Though it's known that the models with 16MB not 256MB NAND flash don't cart the keys over during backup restore. The larger NAND models supposedly do, though I cannot confirm this there have been forum members who have switched out on the same model as mine and had no issues with activation afterwards.

**Derr** · 10-29-2010,12:18 PM

No model I know of transfers the activation data over, tried with a few, always failed.

Even FTP'ing it over was useless, nothing activated.

**gundamwfan** · 10-29-2010,12:31 PM

Well I can confirm, as of today, that by copying over my original act.dat file onto my new hard drive, same user name, same console name, all my DLC works in JB mode. Needs activation in regular mode, but works in JB mode.

**rbf351** · 10-29-2010,01:40 PM

i have 102 files in that directory, and none of them are the act.dat file. they are all .rif files, looks like i'm still out of luck

**gundamwfan** · 10-29-2010,03:06 PM

the .dat file would have to be from the original ps3 hard drive that had the dlc activated, so you'd have had to back it all up via a filemanager or ftp before. Might be a chance if you can switch drives without it asking you to reformat, but I don't know.

**rbf351** · 10-29-2010,03:15 PM

Originally Posted by gundamwfan

the .dat file would have to be from the original ps3 hard drive that had the dlc activated, so you'd have had to back it all up via a filemanager or ftp before. Might be a chance if you can switch drives without it asking you to reformat, but I don't know.

i have the original drive, plugged that in as well, and there is no act.dat file on the machine.

also when switch back to the original hard drive i get the same issue. i can see the songs, but can't play them

**gundamwfan** · 10-29-2010,04:52 PM

So when you plug the original drive back into your ps3, it doesn't ask you to format it? As long as it has the original filestructure and you can play the dlc, you should be good. I know that the act.dat file is in the exdata folder, which I believe is in your home directory. It's in the same folder as the .rif files, and as long as nothing was deleted it should still be there. It's not in devflash 2 or 3 as I was lead to believe, it's on the actual hdd.

**rbf351** · 10-29-2010,04:58 PM

Originally Posted by gundamwfan

So when you plug the original drive back into your ps3, it doesn't ask you to format it? As long as it has the original filestructure and you can play the dlc, you should be good. I know that the act.dat file is in the exdata folder, which I believe is in your home directory. It's in the same folder as the .rif files, and as long as nothing was deleted it should still be there. It's not in devflash 2 or 3 as I was lead to believe, it's on the actual hdd.

when i plug in either drive the machine works normally, but can't access the DLC on either one, both give me the same error.

besides the 100 .rif files i only have 2 other files in there, one is a PS3LOGO.ADT file, and the other is a .edat file for TMNT

**gundamwfan** · 10-29-2010,09:27 PM

Strange. Do you have one of the original backwards compatible PS3's? If so, maybe your keys are in the nand, in which case they should still be in there. But on my PS3, before taking it out I had an exdata folder with an act.dat file inside of it. Try doing a general search on the drive and see what you find. But for future reference, this method worked for my DLC. I PM'ed you in hopes that it would work for yours

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