New PS3 Firmware Causing HDD Upgrade Problems? 82
Channard writes "While there have been occasional reports of previous PS3 firmware upgrades causing system crashes and so forth, Sony's new firmware upgrade for the system, 3.41, is apparently stopping PS3 owners from upgrading their hard disks. This problem has been encountered by many users on Sony's forums and occurs when you try to put a new hard disk into a PS3 that already has the firmware upgrade installed. The general course of action for upgrading a PS3's drive is that you download the latest PS3 firmware onto a memory stick and, after swapping the hard drive in the PS3, plug the stick in, allowing the PS3 to properly prepare the disk for use. But as of upgrade 3.41, the PS3 fails to recognize the firmware on the stick, complaining that it can't proceed until you insert the correct firmware. Repeating the process and re-downloading the firmware does not fix the problem, as I can confirm, having encountered the problem myself. Users can put the old hard disk back in, provided they've not reformatted it for some other purpose, so all is not lost. Sony have apparently told gaming website CVG that 'The information available to our Consumer Services Department does not suggest that this is a problem PlayStation owners are likely to experience when upgrading the HDD with 3.41 update.' This seems to fly in the face of the currently available information — although whether or not this statement was issued by Kevin Butler is unclear. Either way, PS3 owners encountering this problem will likely have to wait a few days for a fix and use their old HDDs for now."
Okay, this is the easy fix. (Score:5, Informative)
Mirror your old drive's contents onto the new drive (Sony even provided a software backup feature IRC for this purpose.)
Install in PS3.
Works like a charm.
Seriously, external media just sucks and is not system-critical to operation. Use system-critical components for the transfer, and you won't have much of an issue.
Only later models (Score:4, Informative)
The original PS3 models probably don't suffer from this, as they use on-board flash ram chips to hold the firmware.
Later versions of the PS3 cut out those flash ram chips as a cost-saving measure, in favor of bootstrapping the firmware from the hard drive. These models store the firmware on the drive, and these are the ones that might have this problem.
Re:ahhh sony (Score:4, Informative)
>> So it's a decent BlueRay player and I still have the games I purchased.
Except it also requires software updates to handle newer Blue Ray discs.
Update: HD replacement worked perfectly (Score:4, Informative)
Update: just swapped out the 60GB HD with a 500GB Hitachi HD and zero problems. Swap, boot, format, done. System info is showing 413GB/465GB free. System software: Version 3.41. I don't know if the slim versions only experience this problem, but it worked flawlessly on an original 60GB model. Now off to restore my backup.
Re:Some points.. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I remember this same conversation. (Score:2, Informative)