Tuesday, April 24, 2012

U is for Ugh.. My PS3's HDD was Corrupted

                                                               
It's not exactly the way I pictured spending my Saturday.

But, I'll back this up a bit. The problem started happening late Friday night. My son started the PS3 and it gave a warning that the hard disk might be corrupted. It was going to try and restore it. It did its thing and went back to normal.

Saturday morning it was working okay, but then the electricity in the house shut off for a second. While the PS3 was on. When we turned it back on, the warning came up again, it did its thing and it was fine. Later on that afternoon, when I turned it on again, I got the same warning, except this time it got stuck in an infinite loop of trying to restore. So for all intents and purposes, the PS3 became an expensive paperweight.

Let me take a minute here, I knew what was happening and I knew this 320gb Slim was only a year old. We don't abuse it, randomly turn it off, call it names, or drop it. I also knew sending it back to Sony would do nothing but cause us time and money.

When the infinite loop happened, I started the PS3 in safe mode and went through all the options until the final one of reformatting the HDD was the only one left. Of course, this means everything on the HDD would be erased. But, I'm a weirdo and even though I haven't been backing up my saved games regularly (for shame, I know) I wasn't upset. When the HDD died,  I was on like my 56th play through of BioShock.  I guess I'm lucky that the most recent games I've bought are either on the 360 or the 3DS. So in reality, I didn't lose anything I was playing for the first time.

Reformatting worked.  Now it's Tuesday and everything's back to normal. If I needed to get another HDD in the future, I'm not too concerned. They're not that expensive and we already upgraded our original 20 gb fat to a 250 gb years ago. (It got the YLOD, but it's fixed now)

So here's the moral of my story. If you really care about your saved data, back it up. If your HDD becomes corrupted, don't send it to Sony. Reformat it or buy a PS3 compatible one. Sometimes even if you try to be super careful, shit happens and things break.

More information about PS3 HDD corruption 

8 comments:

  1. Sorry to hear about your HDD. I don't own a PS3 myself, but I have a 360 that's been gathering dust for the last year or so. Hopefully that would change when I finally get my hands on a copy of Skyrim this friday. Can't wait. :D

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    1. Skyrim is an amazing game! I have it for the 360 too.

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  2. NES-Never broke
    SNES-Never broke
    N64-Never broke
    Gamecube-Never broke
    Wii-Never broke
    Xbox-On my sixth (sixth!)
    PS3-Yours broke
    This Gen-Higher price- Higher rate of faults...

    /Wes-Often broke

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    Replies
    1. Totally!

      Of this gen, only my launch release Wii is still okay. Besides the PS3, my son's 360 RROD'ed once. My brother in law's RROD'ed a few days after. It was nuts. My 360's tray got stuck, that had to be repaired.

      At least we haven't had problems with the DS lite, 3DS or the PSP.

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  3. Yes, always prepare for the worst.

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    Replies
    1. As expensive as consoles are, that's great advice.

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  4. Knock on wood so far both our ps3's are working, ps2 still works, gamecube still works and the wii still works along with our dsi xl's. Will for sure start backing up more often. Our house seems to have issues with laptops... My first two laptops harddrive crashed, my last laptop the screen cracked. Had to replace the battery cord for this one. My husbands last laptop the battery overheated and was causing huge issues. And my brothers harddrive crashed. I think companies set them to do it. Like how for a while ps2's dvd thing would quit working after a little over a year, and I had a few people get the ring of death on their xboxes shortly after their warranty went out...strange at least.

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