HFW to 3.55 OFW (or CFW, whichever is easier)

[TheWhiteTyger]

Greetings, I've stumbled across a CECH-2501B model PS3 Slim and have already installed HEN and HFW onto the system. It was my understanding that with the QA Flag set (which it is, I can enable the Debug menu from under Network Settings) and a 3.55 "downgrader" Update PUP (even Rogero's) would suffice, yet I am unable to install any FW from in-menu update nor the Rescue Menu update.

I've tried to search for any help with this problem, but to no avail. I've found ONE video on YT similarly close to this situation but I don't trust YT vids. Any ideas or suggestions or points to a guide would be appreciated. Old school PS3 hacker from the golden firmware era, just no clue about Hen/HFW.

Thanks in advance!

 

[Berion]

On HEN You cannot set QA flag, so Your post is misleading.

On QA consoles, You don't need any CFW downgrader type. Just *any* firmware, newer or equal to factory one.

Your model could be CFW compatible if You have old bootloader.

 

[Coro]

that model was made around the time that the boot process changed to block cfw.

right now, the online jailbreaking tool is down. it is called bgtoolset. when it returns, it can tell you if you model supports cfw and do the hacking. i wrote a guide for it here. if you get cfw installed and qa flag enabled, you may need to install 3.55 cfw before installing 3.55 ofw.

if your model does not support cfw, then you must use hfw/hen to hack and can NOT downgrade the firmware. you can return to OFW just by installing it.

 

[NiQ]

Greetings, I've stumbled across a CECH-2501B model PS3 Slim and have already installed HEN and HFW onto the system. It was my understanding that with the QA Flag set (which it is, I can enable the Debug menu from under Network Settings) and a 3.55 "downgrader" Update PUP (even Rogero's) would suffice, yet I am unable to install any FW from in-menu update nor the Rescue Menu update.

I've tried to search for any help with this problem, but to no avail. I've found ONE video on YT similarly close to this situation but I don't trust YT vids. Any ideas or suggestions or points to a guide would be appreciated. Old school PS3 hacker from the golden firmware era, just no clue about Hen/HFW.

Thanks in advance!

As Coro said, in the case of 25xx it's impossible to know whether CFW is supported or not just from the model number, but there is an easy way to know -

Download minverchk from here -
PS3 - MinVerChk (Minimum Version Checker) | PSX-Place

Attempt to install it as an update. It will fail and display a message specifying the minimum firmware version your console supports. If it says 3.40 or 3.50 then you can install 3.55 (OFW or CFW, doesn't matter, the process is the same). If it says 3.56 then you can still install CFW but not 3.55, but then again if you stay on CFW there isn't much need to stay on 3.55 anyway since CFW can be freely upgraded to newer CFW (and back by setting the QA flag). If it says 3.60 then CFW is not supported at all and unfortunately neither is downgrade; HEN is your only option.