PlayStation®3 General Discussion

[SuburbanHell]

I've got an 800gb HDD in my launch-day PS3, and my blu-ray laser is on its last legs, so I've put in for a box to ship it to Sony, and one of the first things that you need to do before shipping it out is backing up & wiping out your hdd, ok, so no problem I thought, did this before when I upgraded the hdd from 60gb to 800gb, but the external drive I used at the time was much smaller, so that won't work.

I bought a Western Digital My Book Essential 2TB Desktop External Hard Drive, and proceeded to plug it into the usb port only to find the PS3 doesnt recognize it, because it's NTFS formatted.  After a long day of researching yesterday, it seems that even if I formatted the drive to fat32, that would only work for the first 30GB, which still obviously isn't large enough, so my question is, with no NTFS or exFAT support, how do you use the Backup Utility for a large capacity HDD?

[Cid_Chaos]

Can't say if it's the same for the 2TB HDD, but I've backed up to my day1 60GB PS3 to a 1TB Western Digital HDD (fat32) before. I've just checked and one of the back-up folders is 41GB.

Where did you read that it will only work for the first 30GB, as I've not heard that before.

[SuburbanHell]

I've read in several places that a fat32 format drive has a max capacity of 32GB, the rest of the drive can be partitioned to NTFS.

1TB though, same ballpark for what I'm trying to do, how did you convert your drive to fat32?

[Danlisa]

You need a third party format utility. Windows format is size limited for FAT32. Try CompuApps Swiss Knife (google it).

Also, be warned, not ALL backed up content will restore to a new PS3, some content is coded to the original HDD and/or Motherboard, we call this copy protected content and the only way to restore it on a new machine is to re-download or restore from a PS+ Cloud save.

[SuburbanHell]

Curious, what types of data won't restore?  I'm just looking to put everything I already have back on when Sony sends my PS3 back after fixing the bluray. 

[Cid_Chaos]

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SuburbanHell wrote:

Curious, what types of data won't restore?  I'm just looking to put everything I already have back on when Sony sends my PS3 back after fixing the bluray. 

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Sony will most likely send you a refurbished PS3 not your PS3.

The content that won't be backed-up is any paid/rented video content from the store, also some game saves are copy protected so won't be restored on the new PS3.

More info on the backup utility can be found here -  http://manuals.playstation.net/document/en/ps3/current/settings/backuputility.html

[SuburbanHell]

Ah, ok that's not a big deal, though losing the game saves does kind of suck.

Wait though, refurb and not my actual launch day PS3?  I don't really want to lose my PS2/PS1 Backwards compatibility, and 800gb HDD.  Should I take out my HDD or will they at least give me that back?

[Danlisa]

No, you get a like for like exchange. Return a 60gb Phat model and you get a refurbished one in return. You should place the original HDD back in the device, if you send your 800gb drive away, you will not get it back.

[Cid_Chaos]

Also the PS3 backup utility has been known to fail when restoring sometimes. For this reason I would highly recommend manually copying any content you can (images, music, videos, gamesaves) to an external HDD.

To be honest, if you can, you would be a lot better getting a new slim PS3 and using the transfer utility, as this will copy over everything (copy protected content will be moved to the new PS3 then deleted from the old). this would mean having a big enough HDD in the slim though.

A refurbished PS3 has a good chance of failing (YLOD) within a year and you you'll only get 3 months warranty on it.

Good Luck.

[gymno74]

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SuburbanHell wrote:

I've read in several places that a fat32 format drive has a max capacity of 32GB, the rest of the drive can be partitioned to NTFS.

1TB though, same ballpark for what I'm trying to do, how did you convert your drive to fat32?

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i posted a similar query here once, having read about the same issues (& others) that you've stated.

i recieved some great advice from Kermit1970:

Scroll down this page:

http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?fat32format.htm

until you get to 'Now download a copy of fat32format'

Download it. It will format that drive as a fat32 quicker than you can butter a slice of bread

edit: thread here

http://community.eu.playstation.com/t5/Technical-Help/newby-q-what-ext-hdd-to-buy-fat32-etc/m-p/1549...