@danimalmanimal: So you don’t care about game saves, eh? Well I darn well do, when I’ve played Fallout 3 for over a year & reached level 24. So how do you recover THAT when Sony’s baby dies on you. Took them 13 weeks & 6 calls to get my game disk back & 3 hours to restore the backup.

Sony told me that all HDDs are encrpyted to run only on the PS3 that they are installed in. What a stupid, ignorant idea. Of course, they have to protect the copyrighted stuff we d/l from PSN, but you can’t back that up anyway. They could have formatted the HDD as FAT32 (say) to allow easy backup to a PC via your network & just tie the copyright stuff to the PS3.

So whatever you think of the OP, he should, IMHO, expect that the old HDD would still work in its original PS3. After all he can’t copy anything to it & if he’d put it in another PS3 it would have been reformated.

And how difficult would it be to add a network backup option? I have a 2Tb NAS RAID1 on my network, but I have to backup to a USB drive then copy THAT onto the NAS. Huh, & there’s me thinking Sony knew a thing or two about technology.

You might be hearing me rant on here as well, if my backup doesn’t restore to my new PS3 when it arrives later this week.

We got the YLOD, yellow light of death, with the game disk in the unit(I can’t believe that there’s an accepted term for what I see as a Sony issue, dead machine). So the game was trapped in the machine and the hard drive was unusable. Forget about asking how I got the game out…wasn’t done by Sony.

So what do we need, how about a “Linux guy or gal” who can retrieve the saves on the hard drive and tell us how to use it on the new PS3 we bought over the holiday.

Who really knows how to do this? Sounds like a business opportunity.

Following some research I’ve found that the ps3’s own backup utility doesn’t work properly becauses of it own copy protection system. Er doesn’t that stike you as being stupid?

Lastly, it is the general PS3/PC/Mac user population who are to blame here. Who if they weren’t all obssesd with using torrent sites and sharing PS3 games saves etc the industry wouldn’t need to put these stupid protection protocals in place.

In the mean time the few people like my self who want to copy/move data for honest reasons have to suffer.

I think this will eventually be fixable, most likely by changing the UUID of the partition on the disk to match whatever it is that the PS3 is expecting. The problem is that the entire PS3 HDD is encrypted — including the partition table, so what would normally be a relatively simple matter of modifying the partition table, is currently impossible.

I’m sure it won’t be too long before people manage to work around this though, and it is possible you can recover small portions of the data, such as save files…. so I’d recommend first taking a block copy of the (now useless) HDD first, so you have a backup.

To do all this, you’ll need to run Linux. I would recommend Ubuntu — it will give you an easy system to work with, and plenty of tools to do all of this. Above all, it is predictable — If you want to preserve your data, I would avoid Windows like the plague.

In Linux, plug in the drive, find which device node it is using ( /dev/sdX — e.g. /dev/sdb. You can find this by monitoring your system log when you plug it in) and copy all data off it using the ‘dd’ command:

dd if=/dev/sdX of=save_filename

Now you have a backup of the partition in save_filename. Duplicate it and make sure one copy is ‘untouchable’.

Now, for that ‘detective work’ I was talking about… Apparently the key that the PS3 uses to encrypt the disk is the same each time it encrypts any disk — it is unique for each cell processor. If this is the case, then you’re in luck (if instead it generates a new key each time it formats a disk, then you’re boned, but… I’ve read this isn’t the case).

So, do the same as above for your new disk, that works in the PS3. Again, Copy the backup so you have two copies, just in case.

Now, put the new disk back in the PS3, and copy a single, very large, video file (I suggest mpeg2), to the PS3 from an external disk. Again, remove the disk from the PS3 and dump it again. Then you can compare the block copies to see where the new file is — you should be able to find a contiguous block of data. Now, in there, you should be able to replace some of the inner parts of the block with some of your “lost” data from your boned HDD image.

Now, insert the HDD back into the PS3, and hopefully it still thinks the mpeg file exists — copy it off the PS3 onto an external drive.

Now, you — might — have an mpeg with some useful data in it. back it up, and see if you can run some disk recovery/forensic utilities on it (in Ubuntu, look in Synaptic package manager). The actual files will still be encrypted, but data recovery software may be able to identify a filesystem, and soem people have been able to see things like filenames.

After a fair bit of work, there’s a small chance you’ll be able to slice out portions that correspond to save games. Lots of trial and error, but once you figure it out, the actual process is very easy.

I hope this helps.