PS3 HDD Upgrade Help

SkyEye

Hello, I'm trying to upgrade my 500GB PS3 drive to a larger 750GB one. As far as I could tell I either need to backup to a third drive and restore to the new drive (hopefully unnecessary, as that requires both another drive and twice as much transfer time), or need another PS3 to do a direct data transfer.

Is there a way to directly copy the entire drive onto the new one via USB? Or clone it but allow the PS3 to use the whole of the new drive (a direct clone may only allow it to use the 500GB from the original)? Thanks.

bowen

With the way hard drives work, you could potentially do this, but since it's a PS3, I'd say no you probably can't copy your data without using the PS3's built in software to backup/restore.

If you do a data copy using a computer as an intermediary the PS3 won't see the full size of the hard drive because it was petitioned ahead of time as a 500GB drive (imaging/restore from image). So you'd be putting a 500 GB image into the 750 GB drive, but it'd still be allocated as 500 GBs.

You can expand partitions, but it's a crapshoot, and something tells me the PS3 would not handle it well at all (some OSes don't play nice when you do this either). The least frustrating thing to do would be to do a backup using the ps3, or, start from scratch.

SkyEye

Thanks for the advice. My friend found a hex editor I'll try to use to manually resize the partition; if that doesn't work then I can reformat the HDD and live with taking a few extra hours without my PS3.