New hard drive in Playstation 3 but it will not format?

maybe this should be put into a sticky?

 

/second that. Awesome thread, thanks a ton! This is a problem my friend ran into and couldnt figure out.

-Syn

 

I second that - hopefully people find this thread from google search who are having issues. I recently updated my PS firmware to the newest one and bought a 320gb laptop drive for cheap and then thought this would be easy. I followed the guides online and couldnt figure out what I was doing wrong.

Great guide Z, I have my PS3 now working with a huge hard drive and its awesome ! best upgrade you could ever do, and Sony need to make this clear, after all, they make it extremely easy to get at the HD without even disassembling the console, I think they should append their notes to let people know how to update with new firmwares.

 

Updated mine to a Samsung spinpoint m6 320gb, which is around 60£ here in Denmark, properly lower in UK and the US, plus every other freaking country

Anyway here are some small facts:
7200 RPM drives are a waste of money, they are only a tiny tiny bit faster then 5400 rpm drives, shaving almost nothing of load times. Also 7200 RPM drives get hotter, though I doubt it's a problem in the PS3, but they are a bit more noisy.

The PS3 uses a SATA1 (SATA 150) controller, therefore don't bother looking for SATA2 (SATA 300) disk, as it won't do any good. Sata 2 disks will work in the PS3 though, as they are backwards compatible.

When unscrewing the screw for the mounting tray, use a proper screwdriver which fits, as that screw is a bit "crappy". It's not unheard of people destroying the head of that screw by using a wrong screwdriver.

Good guide Zardon.

 

I recently upgraded the hd while running 2.36 firmware and didn't run into the above issue. Bookmarked just in case tho, thanks much. Now if I could only find a cheap way to upgrade my hurting-for-space 360 and all will be well in gaming land.

 

I think specific versions of the PS3 have different inbuilt flash memory sizes, although the firmwares are getting bigger so you might find with the to be released 2.40 that it wont fit on any of them, so above method will apply for swapping out drives.

 

Yeah that makes sense. Hopefully I never have to upgrade the HD again tho. Still, that is a bad place to cut corners. Sony should be adding more memory to counter the inflating OS and consider saving costs elsewhere imho.

 

i also heard that some hard drives with anti shock sensors or something don't want to work? is this true? or can i pop in any 2.5 SATA HDD that is recent?

 

Hey,

Great post.

I was wondering if anyone knew what the internal HDD is formatted to as it can't be ntfs as it's not supported and it's not fat32 as the internal supports files larger than 4gb.

Reason I ask is that i wish to play my HD files which are often 6-8gb. I have tried all the streaming/network download alternatives but my wireless isn't really fast enough to handle it.

So if i could find out the format or perhaps place an HDD which had been formatted in the ps3 into a caddy. This means I would be able to have an external drive which would support files larger than the fat32.

Cheers in advanced

 

The only known 500gb to fit is the Samsung M6, I'm using the 320gb version, works great!

I believe the PS3 uses an encrypted FAT32, which does't NOT support files over 4gb, so you are pretty much out of luck.

 

Great thread - tried upgrading my 80Gb PS3 with a 500Gb HDD and ran into the exact same problem. Will try your instructions out tonight.

 

I'm currently having a new problem associated with this. I've followed all the steps provided and now for the 3rd time am stuck on the Formatting... screen at 99%. The previous 2 times I have left the PS3 running for at least an hour but it never completes. In searching for others that have had a problem similar to this, everything I've found seems to suggest that formatting the new HD should only take around 5 minutes tops. Am I wrong in this or did I (A) do something incorrect or (B) get a bum drive?

 

Did anyone find a solution or explanation to this yet?
Searching weeks yet, though very few seem to have that problem and noone seems to care :|

Thanks very much in advance

 

First off welcome to DH

I haven't even tried this and cannot give you an answer but seems others have had success so we will leave this open and see what feedback we get.

 

And you are running latest version of the PS3 firmware, version 2.80?

 

Thanks for posting this. This is very poor design on the part of the PS3 imo and I was confused momentarily until a quick google search led me here.

Interesting I didn't see any results from Sony or Playstation on this matter, perhaps I missed them.

 

I am having the same issue. To get you up to speed my PS3 got the YLOD, my mates PS3 had blu-ray drive issues. He gave me his PS3 and from it i have used his motherboard with my blu-ray drive and i currently have both the hard drives (40gb and 80gb from memory). At the beginning of my issues the PS3 was formatting both of the HDD's perfectly and was allowing the install of the latest firmware. However it never completed it. I have received error messages at approx 40% (HDD issue), no error message at 70% (Blu-ray drive) but same again, it paused at 99%. Left it overnight but to no avail. Read on the forums that it was most likely still a HDD issue due to the fact that (as previously stated earlier in the thread) part of the firmware update is stored in the HDD. I also read in other forums that if you are having issues 'zero' the HDD, so i have used command prompt on windows 7 (as the standard right click does not present the option of formatting in fat32 at the same time) so i typed in the command "format (drive /fs:FAT32 /p:1" (actually insert the drive letter for the HDD to be formatted where it says "drive"). Now the PS3 doesnt allow the firmware to be installed ("corrupt data") and the other error message that shows is "a fatal error has occured".

Now the HDD's still work as i can re-format them and detect them on my laptop but the PS3 is seriously unhappy with me. I have also read that there are a few tricks and certain order things must be done in so i am currently having a play with that side of things. If anyone can help that would be great but if not i will post results as i find them out!:duh: