I'm back! (I can hear you all sigh
)
I been absent for a bit as my frustrations lead me to needing a break from the PS3 stuff, but I got back on to it a few weeks ago.
I've been quietly doing my own thing, and now that I'm done, I thought I'd share with you where I've got to since I last posted.
The console I had originally converted from OFW into CFW, but deactivated my account on before the conversion has been fully refurbished. Stripped down, cleaned up, CMOS battery replaced, and a new HDD installed.
I put this console through a series of events in my own attempts to be happy to put it back online with my own cherished account login.
Originally at CFW 4.91.2, I downgraded the console to OFW 4.89.
Then I pulled the HDD and replaced it with a new one.
Again, with OFW 4.89, the console was completely built up again on this new HDD.
At this point, I removed the HDD and formatted it using my laptop and stripped down the console for cleaning out, pulling the CMOS battery and cleaning/reapplying thermal paste to the chipsets. The CMOS battery was pulled from the board for around 24hrs in total.
Then after rebuilding the console, I rebuilt it again using OFW 4.89 on the newly formatted new HDD.
Then I updated to OFW 4.90.
Then I updated to OFW 4.91.
At this point, I repeated the removal of the HDD, formatted it, disassembled the console and pulled the CMOS battery again for another 24hrs or so.
Then after rebuilding the console one last time, I then rebuild the console on OFW 4.91 on the newly formatted HDD once more.
At this point, I thought to myself that there is nothing else I can do to attempt to remove all evidence of CFW ever being on this console before putting it back online again, and signing into my cherished account. Checking the chipset information from ps3tools.com shows that the retained memory shows the latest two firmware versions to be 4.91 and then 4.91 again, which is representative of there being a HDD swap from the original HDD to the replacement, both sporting OFW 4.91 as far as Sony are concerned. So nothing untoward there.
I was happy to prove the console online now. I logged in using my temporary secondary account I created earlier this year, and all looked good with it. No issues observed. Then I logged in using my cherished account, and again, nothing untoward there.
At this point, I proceeded to install every game I own on to the machine, and downloaded all my PSN account content on to it so that this machine was fully representative of everything I own for PS3.
Due to the history of the machine already being CFW, and being armed with the idps and eid_rootkey files, I had no need to make this machine CFW again (If I didn't need to), so with everything on it, I then proceeded to remove the HDD and plugged it into my laptop. From here, I was able to copy my activated act.dat, all my rif files, game updates, patches, addons, psn games, save files, trophies, everything; over to my laptop.
I was then able to convert my rif files correctly into rap files.
I also dragged off a copy of my registry file.
Using everything from that console, I was then able to hack the registry file of my fulltime CFW console to make it as my cherished account and put all of my newly acquired content from the OFW console on to it, and activate everything and and have everything work as it does on my fulltime OFW console, which still remains unopened and untampered under my TV. All my games work, all my save games load up, and all my trophies continue to be recognised etc (or so it would seem). I preferred the approach of hacking the registry rather than resigning content as it means it doesn't matter which console I use to continue a save game or collect a trophy on, as this can then be transplanted to another console without much hassle. I also couldn't work out how to get Apollo to resign trophies. Save games work OK, but trophies doesn't seem to have a way of doing it similarly....?
There was quite a long time spent matching file structures between the content on my laptop, and making the CFW console file structure appropriately the same etc, but that's fine as it gave me time to read about and understand what some of the files are for etc, which has allowed me to further my learning.
So the end result is, that I now know and understand what needs to be done to do what I've done, and I've now proven to myself that I can do it, and I'm very happy with the result. I'm thinking about writing a guide instruction for others to follow, as I still feel that if such a thing had existed earlier in the year when I was trying to do everything for the first time, I wouldn't have fallen down the pitfalls I experienced and could have had this done a lot quicker than the time it eventually took me to do.
The next step I'm thinking about undertaking is converting folder games into package files to make it easier to install in the future, so back to do more reading I guess...
