Upgraded fat PS3 with 1TB Samsung M8 HN-M101MBB

I've just upgraded my fat 80GB PS3 with a 1TB Samsung M8 HN-M101MBB 2.5" hard drive. I use the PlayTV addon to record TV to the hard drive so having a lot of space is useful. This drive was the first 1TB 9.5mm high drive available, it is important because the taller drives will not fit in the PS3. OcUK sell this drive.



Getting it running was far from easy, all the guides on the Internet explain a pain free installation but I couldn't get it working. To start with the only thing I could get from the PS3 was the following message:



This is just a generic "hard drive" error message. I tried using the diagnostics menu on the PS3 (hold power button until PS3 turns on and off, hold power button again until you get 2 beeps). The diagnostics menu wasn't able to see the hard drive either.

I partitioned the drive on a PC using disk management and then formatted the volume as FAT32 using fat2format.exe. This didn't seem to to anything to help though, I was still getting the "Cannot start. The correct hard disk was not found" message. This step may have been unnecessary (it's certainly never mentioned in any of the guides I've found, the PS3 should sort this out by itself).

Eventually I managed to get the PS3 to boot and display this message:



Pressing the "PS" button to restart just resulted in the hard drive error again. I downloaded the 3.7 system update (PS3UPDAT.PUP) and installed in on a USB memory stick at (PS3/UPDATE/PS3UPDAT.PUP). Pressing start + select caused the PS3 to detect the update on the memory stick and it the following message came up:



From here on it was fine, the firmware installed the the drive was formatted fine. The drive is detected fine by the system:



The last step is to restore from a backup if you made one.

The good news is that this drive does work in the older fat PS3 models but it might not be a straightforward process. I've created this thread in the hope that Google indexes it and it is able to help out anyone else with the same problem as I couldn't find anyone else with this problem.

UPDATE: The 827GB out of 931GB space on the drive is on a factory setting PS3 (nothing installed). For some reason Sony reserve 10-12% of the drive capacity for OS caching purposes (they aren't really clear on what they use it for). This is a setting hard coded into the OS, on the lower capacity models such as the 80GB one this only equates to about 8.8GB but as soon as you stick a terabyte drive in the thing that shoots up to 103GB.

So what you are really saying is... "I followed the instructions for installing. a new hard drive"

you seem to have really over complicated all of this.

This has been the case for years RobH, i'm certain there's plenty of threads with people explaining this process, it looks like you unfortunately got the tutorial for the old 60gb/the very first 40gb units.

From what i've read the 10% partition is mainly to cache stuff when it's installing etc, i did read an article years ago that explained why it needed to be 10% of the drive in some way or another but i've forgotten the details long ago. It has something to do with being able to install a game without needing double the space for the installer and the installed game itself

what do you want? a medal?

Thanks for that very useful feedback...

I'm just trying to save someone some pain in the future, what I expected to be a 10 minute job took 2 hours. I found over 10 guides both for fat/slim PS3s and not one of them mentioned what to do when it doesn't just work. The error message I got was nowhere to be seen in the guides.

You seemed to have missed a very important point. How did you go from the "Cannot start" message to the "The system software cannot be run correctly" message?

All you say is "Eventually I managed to get the PS3 to boot." You don't explain what you did.

Iirc RobH it tells you you'll need to install the firmware using a data stick in the manual supplied with the console?

ic1male said:

You seemed to have missed a very important point. How did you go from the "Cannot start" message to the "The system software cannot be run correctly" message?

All you say is "Eventually I managed to get the PS3 to boot." You don't explain what you did.

Click to expand...

It doesn't matter really, in the new PS3 manuals it just states to put in new drive, download firmware, start ps3 and hold start + select to install. You don't need any particular message to be appearing as holding start + select at boot causes the ps3 to search the data stick for firmware before the hard drive.

The issue is the older ps3s (60GB + first wave of 40GB) had the firmware stored on a flash chip, whereas the newer ones (late 40gb and onwards) store it on the hard drive. By replacing the hard drive you've taken the OS partition out of the machine so it's unable to find it. All you need to do is download the firmware, chuck it on a data stick and point the PS3 in its direction (by holding start + select)

Ah, maybe that's what he did then - just hold Start + Select.

Cheers for this, was going to planning to update mine over the weekend!

99% of guides seem to omit the part about needing to install the firmware on a USB stick to get it to work which is what caused all my problems.

i was thrown with this, cos i originally had Phat's, and swapped over the HD's.. Then getting the slims i once again upgraded and had to read up on the net on what to do.. Threw me for a while. so i guess anyone who's had a fatty and wanted to now stick it in a skinny, would probably find this guide a little useful, if they could be bothered to read it.