Technical Help

[Frasswass]

Hi guys,

Wondering if anyone can help me with this problem?

I have backed up my PS3 a number of times over the years and always to my 500GB Western Digital hard drive.

It has worked in the past no problem but this time round when I went to make a backup, the PS3 claims my hard drive is only 52GB large and therefore won't perform the backup as I require about 120GB of space.

There is definitely more than enough space left on the hard drive (300+GB at last glance) and my PC still recognises this fact so it can't be anything to do with the hard drive itself surely.

Any suggestions? Has there perhaps been some limit put on the amount you can backup in a recent update and if so, why??

Cheers.

Adam.

[LariosoDog]

Is your external hdd a single partition?

I have a 2T hdd and had a couple of FAT32 partitions and it always use the last one - not the first that I thought. I wish PS3 would make a list that you can choose from instead.

So check you only got one FAT32 partition?

I did a backup of 134G to a 700G parition the other day - and it went fine(took 17 hours). The only thing lately since fw 3.73 is that it takes 4 times longer to backup than before. Sony is aware of this and I hope it will be fixed in a coming update.

Other things I discovered in doing research for slow backups was that aborted operations leaves plenty lost chains on drive when checking scandisc from pc.

Make a scandisc from pc is maybe one way of getting forward with your issue?

[Frasswass]

Hi LariosoDog,

Cheers for the reply.

My HDD is a single FAT32 partition and on my PC it shows that it's healthy with no issues and that the size is 465.64GB with 255.47GB free space and the recycle bin is also empty so I'm not sure what else to do?

I haven't tried another HDD yet which may be the next step as I can't format this HDD as it has heaps of other data on it that I can't transfer off.

Any other ideas guys??

[SuperFastZombie]

Hi Frasswass,

When you connect the HDD to the PlayStation 3 press Triangle and select Information.  The free space should be displayed.

Does the PlayStation 3 display the correct free space when you do this?

[fi8767]

You can also find this free space display under

Settings->System settings->system information

[Frasswass]

I'm about to try it again after defragging the HDD, see if that makes a difference but no, previously, when I pressed triangle and looked at the size available it just says 52GB every time, almost like an imposed limit.

[SuperFastZombie]

Let me know how you get on later, also do you have a second HDD or USB drive you can connect.  Obviously you wont be able to do your back up on a smaller drive but you can test to see if the correct available space is being displayed.

[Frasswass]

The defrag made no difference at all, it still said there was only 52GB available. I'm hopefully going to get a shot of another HDD today to see what happens to it, it is also a 500GB one. The correct size was shown when I inserted a memory stick but I have not tried it with a pen drive yet either.

[Frasswass]

Another quick question - I'm at work and the only other HD I can "borrow" is an actual 500GB SATA HD, I have a SATA to USB converter at home - will this work if I plug it into my PS3, any tried that yet?

[Frasswass]

Hi again guys,

I'm getting nowhere fast here - tried that SATA drive but it was formatted in NTFS format. Tried to convert to FAT32 but couldn't do it.

Now got a hold of yet another external HD from a friend (this one is 1TB) but again it's formatted in NTFS which the PS3 won't support.

I'm loathe to reformat his HD to try to get it to FAT32 as I doubt it would even work anyway.

My only 2 options left are either delete all data off my existing Western Digital 500GB hard drive (which I know definitely did work in the past) and try again or go and buy another FAT32 formatted HD!

Any more suggestions?

Don't Sony have an official line over external HD sizes or recommendations on backups? I can't find any info online anywhere.....