My PS3 is bricked...

[archosman]

Was in the middle of GTA4 and it froze up and shut down. Now when I try and turn it on it stays on for 3 seconds then shuts down and beeps 3 times. The light flashes red as well. Anyone know if this can be fixed or is it going to be a trip to Sony? I've got one of the early 80 gig ones that has the hardware emulation for older Playstation games.

[tkam]

You could try a different hard drive to see if that's it, but I'd still expect it to boot even with a bad HD since the base OS is kept in on-board rom.

You'll probably end up having to ship it back to Sony, their turnaround time is pretty quick from what I hear, but you won't necessarily get your PS3 back and they don't have any of the originals left so most likely you'll get stuck with a newer one that doesn't have the hardware emulation chip.

[mirumu]

It's a long shot, but you could try turning it on and holding your finger on the power button for about 5-10 seconds. Normally you'll hear two beeps which indicates the system settings have been reset to the default values. Probably not much chance it will help, but there's no harm in trying.

[archosman]

Looks like I'll have to send it off to Sony for $150. Probably won't do it for awhile since I also have to pay for an AVID training class. That's gonna cost $1500 out of my own pocket.

[tkam]

It's not still under warranty? That blows.

[archosman]

Originally Posted by tkam

It's not still under warranty? That blows.

Nope. Got it when they first came out.

What I've been told by Gamestop is they will most likely send me a new one instead of repairing the old one. I'll lose everything on the drive, but that's not the end of the world.

I did pull the drive out and try to save the data, but evidently it's some sort of proprietary format. My Mac wouldn't read it. Wonder if I should try the Windows side of my machine.

Also found out the system can't share drives with one another.

Other bad thing is mine has the hardware emulation chips in it instead of the newer software emulation for older PS2 games. You can't get the hardware one anymore. Starting to miss it since I've been picking up more Blu-Rays.

[mirumu]

Yes, from my understanding they encrypt the PS3 partitions with some key that's unique to each PS3. I think they use some odd partition table format too that no operating systems currently will read (My bet would be on Linux doing this first).

You could mirror the entire drive on a Mac from the command line using dd (not for the feint of heart), but even if you restore it to the new drive the new PS3 would not be able to decrypt the data and would want to format it.

I know nothing of Gamestop since they don't exist in this part of the world, but personally I'd argue with them that losing your data is not acceptable. I don't know if you have any Playstation store downloads, but personally I've bought some retail price things like Siren: Blood Curse and if they tried to tell me I wasn't getting that back I'd be hassling them no end. This is a problem they are going to deal with more and more as digital downloads become more common and the more people that complain to them about it the sooner they'll come up with a solution.

[archosman]

You know for the money I think I'm going to just go ahead any buy another one after Christmas. At least I'd get a brand new one instead of a refurb...

[strid3r]

Originally Posted by archosman

You know for the money I think I'm going to just go ahead any buy another one after Christmas. At least I'd get a brand new one instead of a refurb...

Might as well try your luck on Amazon Vote:
Amazon.com Customers Vote

The PS3 Family Bundle is leading btw.