Saturday, April 11, 2009

PS3 update

So, no luck, PS3 still not working, i.e. it does the following:



(Not my PS3 btw - just someone with a similiar issue)

I think that this is also called the yellow light of death in some circles, but there you go.

Anyway, contacted Sony, but all that they could do since the warranty is out of date is replace my PS3 with a refurbished PS3 for £145.00. Since I didn't fancy what would be in effect be a second hand repaired model for this price, I have decided to get a new model.

Unfortunately PS3's are completely sold out in Guernsey at the moment, so I have order from Amazon and will hopefully get next week some time.

It means that I have now lost all my save game data, but thankfully I wasn't really in the middle of anything to drastic (thank goodness I completed Fallout 3 a few weeks ago).

7 comments:

Sinbad said...

Ouch, expensive.

But I don't see why you would lose your saves. Why can't you just switch the hard drives, or copy the saves across? You can certainly do this on the 360 (most people I know with out of warranty machines just buy a cheap Arcade unit and switch the HD) and the PS3 is supposed to be more standard in this area I thought...

Bazlurgan said...

Yes - very expensive unfortunately :(

I also bet you that knowing my luck the PS3 will drop in price drastically within the month... Just to spite me!

I hadn't thought about switching the hard drives... An interesting idea. I know that the hard drive (whilst standard on the PS3) is a bitch to get out, but I guess I could always give it a try.

Alternatively, as for copying the saves across, how were you thinking of doing this? Would it be possible to hook the hard drive up to a PC and copy these onto a USB stick? If so, would you know how to do this?

Thankfully with the DLC content I can just redownload these, it was just the saves that I wouldn't normally be able to recover.

Sinbad said...

Ok Ive done a bit of searching and I don't think you can do it, and I can see why.

The problem is, ironically, that the PS3 *does* let you use any standard hard drive. In order to stop people exploiting this to duplicate save game data to other PS3s, they lock the HDD contents to the individual PS3. Inserting the HDD from one PS3 into another one will just trigger a reformat, you can't use the contents, because it doesn't know if you just duplicated someone else's HDD.

The reason it works on the 360 is because the HDD is custom and has some extra copy protection circuitry built into it. Therefore you can't copy it, so it's safe for them to let you move it between machines. Also they provide a 'data transfer kit' that you can use to move data from one HDD to another (with only one console), but the process forcibly deletes the source HDD afterwards - again they can guarantee this will happen because it's protected by custom hardware.

So actually in this case, accepting 3rd party standard components means Sony have to be less flexible. From what I read the only way you can do it is to back up the saves to USB or external HDD from the *same* working PS3, which is impossible once the machine has failed. Sucks.

Sinbad said...

Actually it seems that you can't even restore some save games to another PS3 if you've backed them up, because the copy protection doesn't let you. KZ2 & LBP are affected by this, among others. So not only can you not plug in the HD, even if you backed them up and then your PS3 died, you still wouldn't be able to restore them to the replacement. That really sucks - it seems that the backup option is only 100% effective if you need to restore the data onto a new HDD on the same PS3.

I don't know why they've done it like this, if they were going to copy protect save games, they should have done it against the gamer profile like the 360 does, not the physical PS3.

Bazlurgan said...

Yeah I must confess that after your first post I did a little research on various forums and reached the same conclusion.

Its a bugger, yes.

I'm not too concerned. At least all my online trophies will be kept and also my online gaming states and records (for the likes of KZ2, COD & MGO etc). The only thing I would be annoyed about is if the DLC for Fallout 3 ever made it to the PS3. I sunk around 60 hours into Fallout 3 and I don't know if I'd have the energy to repeat the experience for the DLC!

asoe said...

can you not recover you game data if you take your HDD out and back it up on to another System then put in your new PS3. then restore your data.

when i switch my HDD when i got a bigger one i backed every thing up onto an ipod an then put it all back on my new HDD. worth a try.

Bazlurgan said...

Thanks for the suggestion Asoe.

Unfortunately I do not think that this will work - whenever you place a new hard drive in a PS3 it automatically insists that you format it before use and as such - all the data on my HDD would be lost in the process.

I'm happy enough to live without my save data, it's not too bad.