If I read this in a novel or saw it in a movie I would say, “No way. Forget it. No way did that all happen.” I swear to you, though, that all of this happened. This is how we spent our Sunday evening…
A few weeks ago, our PS3 — the hub of our media world — started to act a bit flaky. We’ve had it a little over a year and it was second hand then, so we weren’t completely surprised. It’s an older model, with only a 40GB drive that was full. Even after Mike scrubbed some of the excess downloads and junk, it was still unable to save new game data.
So, we priced out new PS3s. Options for a replacement were $299.99 for one with a 160GB drive or $349.99 for one with a 320GB drive. We decided 320GB would be overkill right now so were set to suck it up and buy the smaller one after we grabbed some other items in the store.
While Mike was getting the staff to check their stock, I wandered back to the aisle of PS3 accessories. I found the HipStreet 500GB Hard Drive Upgrade Kit for just $79.99. “Huh.” I thought, “that’s a lot cheaper than $299.” I ran it by Mike and he was willing to give it a shot. I asked a staffer whether he’d had any feedback. He said no. I asked if he’d had many returned. Again, no. Good sign, I thought. We bought it, came home, and so began a long, frustrating evening of tech upgrade purgatory. Mike even pulled out an obscure reference I had to look up: Zeno’s Paradox.
The handy DVD that came in the kit made it look pretty straightforward: open the drive cover, remove the drive (5 screws — one to hold the enclosure in place, 4 to hold the drive in the enclosure.), swap the drives, reverse to replace, then re-boot and format the drive. Pretty reasonable. Before we did that, though, we wanted to back-up the information on the old drive — a little under 40GB worth.
Mike plugged in an external 1TB drive. No dice. The system could not see it. We tried a thumb drive. Success! But not large enough. Over an hour of searching through our tech bits for a suitably sized thumb drive was fruitless. I tried a second external drive. Nada.
Meanwhile, Mike was making dinner. I decided it was time to RTFM and checked online. I found the key problem: the drive needed to be formatted in FAT32 file system in order to be readable. Mike had the solution to that, and went off to dig out an old 80GB external drive.
He connected it and, naturally, it lacked enough space. ARGHH. So, delete, shuffle, delete, delete, re-try. Success. But not right away. The PS3 took it’s time to shove the information through the USB cable so, a little over an hour later, the back up was complete.
Next step, remove drive. Cover, no problem. Remove the enclosure, check. Remove the four screws, check, check, check, damn. The fourth screw was stripped. When I looked at it, I asked if it was a Robertson-head. Nope, it was Phillips at one point in its life. We tried every screwdriver in every IT kit in the house. No luck. We tried pliers; we tried to wedge it; and eventually, Mike tried to drill it out. No luck.
I asked Mike to put it down for a while. “Just walk away,” I said. The drive was too hot anyway.
I dug out all my jeweler pliers but I could not get any purchase on the screw head. I figured eventually, I could just wear it down. If I’d had a file, I would have tried to wear a flat gully across the whole head to use it with a flat-head screwdriver. Essentially, that’s what Mike eventually did but he used a Dremel attachment to cut through the screwhead and turn the screw from a Philips to a slot headed screw. Out came the bastard screw.
As you can guess, a couple of hours plus a couple of frustrated people equals a slightly bent drive enclosure and, as you can also guess by everything thus far, the drive did not want to come out. Mike persevered though and was soon able to swap the drives. Back into the living room it went, to be hooked back into the system. We expected some beeps but got little feedback until it helpfully suggested plugging a controller in via USB and hitting a button.
Oh, but we weren’t done being toyed with just yet.
Apparently, nothing could be done because the software update could not be found. WTF? Mike looked for it from the backup files — nope. I copied the key phrase off the message and found the download. I plunked it on to a thumb drive and continued. By now we were both past angry and on to determined. It would be upgraded or given a decent burial.
I installed the software update, then followed the instructions to format the new drive. Here goes nothing!
A welcome screen suggested success. Next was the backup. Mike followed the instructions and…. we wait. Because remember how it took over an hour before? It has to go back the same way.
Midnight and it says the transfer is complete… deep breath … and hit X to continue.
“Data for unregistered users was found on the backup device. Data has been restored for the following users: user1”
%#*! WTF does that mean? Well, I can only go one direction so… hit the PS button… and hope for the best.
It looked suspiciously “right.” I saw my username and changed to that login: it remembered my background settings and it looked like our downloaded games are there… a few more checks reveal that the game save data was in place and our system was reading about 385GB of available space. I figured that user1 message was just there to piss us off.
(Two days later I realized what wasn’t saved — all the data from our downloaded games, including Peggle and Zuma.)
In the end it took roughly 7 hours to get the drive upgraded. Although it means less tech in the landfill (and I am happy about that), it was a whole lot of pain for us. While I realize that it would have taken much less time and pain without the stripped screw, I’m still keeping my mouth shut next time. We can just buy the replacement console like everyone else.