PS3 hard drive replacment advice

Thanks everyone for the MASSIVE amount of help you've given me, its much appreciated. The hard drive has been posted out via Royal Mail, so its just waiting for it to come now :(
 
The hard drive arrived yesterday.

I had already backed up everything on to an external hard drive I had, I synced my trophies before taking the backup. ALL the stuff I had on my PS3 prior to replacing the hard drive were exactly as they were when they were restored onto my new PS3 hard drive. Even my girlfriend's bought/downloaded PS1, PS2 games.

All in all it was a easy enough thing to do. The only problem I ran into was that I pretty much rounded the philips head on one of the 4 hard drive caddies screws (the metal is really soft (soft has s h i t comes to mind lol), so when I reinstalled the new hard drive, I just finger tightened this screw.

Out of interest, does anyone know where you can purchase these screws from and if so what do you look for/ask for?

Thanks to everyone who has helped me, its gratefully appreciated :)
 
fatboy1971 said:
The only problem I ran into was that I pretty much rounded the philips head on one of the 4 hard drive caddies screws (the metal is really soft (soft has s h i t comes to mind lol), so when I reinstalled the new hard drive, I just finger tightened this screw.

Out of interest, does anyone know where you can purchase these screws from and if so what do you look for/ask for?
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Maybe a hardware store or DIY store has the correct scews, or you can leave it, 3 screws is enough, the drive isn't going anywhere.
 
fatboy1971 said:
The hard drive arrived yesterday.

I had already backed up everything on to an external hard drive I had, I synced my trophies before taking the backup. ALL the stuff I had on my PS3 prior to replacing the hard drive were exactly as they were when they were restored onto my new PS3 hard drive. Even my girlfriend's bought/downloaded PS1, PS2 games.

All in all it was a easy enough thing to do. The only problem I ran into was that I pretty much rounded the philips head on one of the 4 hard drive caddies screws (the metal is really soft (soft has s h i t comes to mind lol), so when I reinstalled the new hard drive, I just finger tightened this screw.

Out of interest, does anyone know where you can purchase these screws from and if so what do you look for/ask for?

Thanks to everyone who has helped me, its gratefully appreciated :)
Click to expand...

I did the same first time round - Had to drill it out and never replaced the screw don't worry about it. That was 2 years ago lol
 
5punk3monk3y said:
I did the same first time round - Had to drill it out and never replaced the screw don't worry about it. That was 2 years ago lol
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I was lucky, I chewed the slot but with a bigger Philips screwdriver, I was able to remove it. Yeah 3 tight screws and 1 finger tightened screw will hold the drive more than adequately.
 
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-248-WD

Stuck that in my launch day 60Gb PS3 5 days ago and it runs fine, plenty of space now. Previously I had 3GB spare on the 60GB drive, quite happy with the plenty of room the new drive gives me. The only issue I had when removing the old drive was that damn blue screw, I nearly stripped it, had to get pliers on it. Cheap metal screws used by Sony.
 
Hehe, looks like a lot of people messed up the screws, I had one buggger when I had a 60GB PS3, I had to saw a slot in the screw to get it out with a flathead.

With my Slim I did not have any problems though.
 
Yeah, the screws on the fats are absolutly terrible, was a pain in the *** when I swapped a mates 40GB HDD for a 160GB I had lying round :(

The ones on the slim are much better.
 
I agree about the screws, they are terrible. I thought I would have had problems with the blue screw but this came out with no problem. But 3 out of the 4 caddie screws came out with no problems, but you always seem to get one bugger that refuses to budge, and that was the case with mine.

It would be a good idea if there was some after market screws made of harder steel, then at least if you are replacing your drive, you could at the same time replace the screws, thus preventing problems with chewed or snapped screws in the future.

If the screws had been made of toffee they would have been stronger :D
 
A big thanks also to the info in this thread. Have just upgraded my phat 40GB to 640GB. Glad I downloaded the firmware as my PS3 wouldn't format the disk itself until I had put the firmware in an UPDATE folder on the pendrive I used to backup the data. Once it had that everything went smoothly.

Have bought a little caddy for the 40GB drive and just curious to know about formatting it. Do I go for NTFS or FAT? I am just going to use it for storage of media basically and am hoping that my car stereo might be able to recognise it. My only concern is that the stereo isn't likely to be able to read NTFS afaik.

If using Fat32Formatter, will it allow me to create one big 37.26GB partition? Thanks again, really useful info in here.
 
-BA- said:
A big thanks also to the info in this thread. Have just upgraded my phat 40GB to 640GB. Glad I downloaded the firmware as my PS3 wouldn't format the disk itself until I had put the firmware in an UPDATE folder on the pendrive I used to backup the data. Once it had that everything went smoothly.
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My Phat PS3 didn't need the firmware that I had backed up on to my USB flash drive. I basically just installed the new hard drive, switched the PS3 on, it then mentioned that it wasn't formatted. Once it was formatted, I just restored the backup I had taken from the old hard drive and everything was perfect.

I too bought a caddie for my old PS3 60 GB hard drive. I now use it to add video on to my PS3.

Re your car stereo. I would format the caddie hard drive in NTFS first and then try putting some MP3's on to the caddie drive, then connect it to your car stereo and see if it works. If it doesn't, try doing the same but format it with the Fat 32 format program. Mind you, it could be a case of if the car stereo would be able to power a hard drive, a USB stick maybe, because it doesn't require has much power has a hard drive.

It might be a good idea though, to have a look on the manufacturers website for your car stereo to see if there is any mention of what can be used and if so is there any mention of the format method of the storage device.
 
fatboy1971 said:
My Phat PS3 didn't need the firmware that I had backed up on to my USB flash drive. I basically just installed the new hard drive, switched the PS3 on, it then mentioned that it wasn't formatted. Once it was formatted, I just restored the backup I had taken from the old hard drive and everything was perfect.

I too bought a caddie for my old PS3 60 GB hard drive. I now use it to add video on to my PS3.

Re your car stereo. I would format the caddie hard drive in NTFS first and then try putting some MP3's on to the caddie drive, then connect it to your car stereo and see if it works. If it doesn't, try doing the same but format it with the Fat 32 format program. Mind you, it could be a case of if the car stereo would be able to power a hard drive, a USB stick maybe, because it doesn't require has much power has a hard drive.

It might be a good idea though, to have a look on the manufacturers website for your car stereo to see if there is any mention of what can be used and if so is there any mention of the format method of the storage device.
Click to expand...

I would try Fat32 then NTFS tbh.
 
dbmzk1 said:
Firmware is firmware. It's nothing to do with the hard drive :p
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It does, on newer models parts of the firmware is stored on the harddrive so you need to have a USB stick or external drive with the firmware on it.
On the launch models there was enough flash memory on the machine to hold the firmware.
 
dbmzk1 said:
Firmware is firmware. It's nothing to do with the hard drive :p
Click to expand...

Yeah I had a message on screen, when I first powered on the machine (and after subsequent reboots), to put the driver software (ie: contained in the PS3UPDAT.PUP file) on from an external media. As soon as I did that it moved forward with formatting the harddrive and installing the firmware.

Re: car stereo powering the external hard drive. I had wondered about this too so it may well not work. I will try a basic FAT32 first and see if that works. Once again though, does the Fat32Formatter utility allow me to create one big 37GB partition?
 
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