Need a little hardware diagnostic help

D

Deerhurst

Forum Noob
Noobie here. I've had a Slim PS3 since about 2010 or 2011 but I was recent given an old fatty and I want to make sure it works right and for a while. I'm super stoked for this early backwards compatible fatty with media card reader. It's an old 80GB "E".

Got the fat PS3 from a coworker because it had been in a box for 4 years or so unused and was in a FLOOD! He said it didn't work at all. It boots and runs awesome. I have not tried the media card reader yet.

The problem seems to be the disc drive. I was able to breathe some life into the old disc drive (rusted carriage, seized motors) and align it so it would take in a disc. After that it would do nothing and refused to eject the disc.

I replaced the drive with a basically new one I was guaranteed will work thinking the spindle motor or the laser was bad. Exact same results. Takes in a disc but that's it. I can hear it spin the disc when it boots.

I'm now wondering if the controller board is bad and how difficult it is to pair to the mobo. Is there a definitive way to test the board?

I have not yet jailbroken it, CFW'd it. I'd like to get the disc drive fixed before I do that and install a larger HDD. It'll mostly be media center duty in the future.


Any tips or pointers?
 
Poor old war horse may have crapped its self. Got it jailbroken with the bgtoolset and was trying to get the CFW installed. It went into a loop. Pulled the HDD and did a quick NTFS format on it hoping that would trigger it into re-formatting the drive but now it just goes green light, makes some noise in the disc drive, waits about a minute and shuts off with no display. Going to let it cool off even though it is not warm to the touch and the cooling system is all clear.

Got into recover mode and I think it's trying to format the hard drive.
 
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You will be unable to install any fw if BD is not married or broken (but if she trying spin the disc, it means that at least it works).
 
Unfortunately that means it's stuck without an OS then.

I pulled the disc out of the drive.

This poor old thing has had a rough life. The old HDD smells like pond scum. Was getting a 8002F14E error with the "new drive" trying to drop Rebug on it. Currently trying to put 4.81 (same version it had) OFW back on it though Safe Mode.

The drive controller seems to work, mostly. It just doesn't seem to want to read or acknowledge discs. It'll accept discs but won't read or give them back.
 
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honestly, i think sony made the boot loop and some other problems purposefully in order to generate money from repairs. think about it...what is the point of bad disc drive making hdd-based games unplayable? so that you have to pay them to fix the drive even if you do not have any disc games!
 
Well, got consistent 8002F281 (I'm trying to remember since I didn't write it down) now. I think that points to hard drive weirdness.

Re-seated and re-aligned the disc drive when I got my PS2 disc out of it. Seems to have fixed the disc drive fault.

The 281, from my reading and lack of knowledge, indicates it doesn't like the HDD format. It does this with the original and my FAT32 formatted 500GB drive. The formatting didn't take as long as I expected, usually FAT32 takes some time to format a drive, so maybe there is something with that?

Any tips on that?

I want this fatty to live!!!

Being my first experience with jailbreaking and CFW a PS3, this isn't a good one.
 
It doesn't matter how You will format HDD, for PS3 is a blank space because she using custom partition table with a lot of partitions and everything will be encrypted by unique per console key.

Have You check S.M.A.R.T of this HDD? Maybe it dying.
 
Good point. Forgot about that. Windows freaks out when it sees the PS3's table.

I haven't checked SMART. That drive was a working Linux box this morning. The old one could be on its way out. I'm honestly blown away that it even works with the fact it smells like a scummy pond.

I may pull the "new" 500GB and give it another format and check it with seatools. Might use a Linux box to do a proper format on it tomorrow and check it with the UBCD for issues.

As for my disc drive, something in there isn't happy. I was under the impression that you could still update and all that as long as the PS3 saw the daughter board, otherwise it wouldn't boot. Might be why it wasn't booting earlier. I might have bumped the ribbon cable out, the connector hold down exploded when I took it apart the first time. Frog Tape is it's lifeline right now.

The guts of the disc drive is brand new (warranty void now!) But that poor daughter board has seen brought times.


Been doing more reading, windows 10 might be screwing everything up. I'll do it all on Linux tomorrow.
 
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Tried different media to update from. No change. 8002F218 code.

Trying a different hard drive. It's taking a while so I assume it is formatting. It did pop up a message about formatting the drive so I assume it likes this drive better. That's further than we've gone before! And back to "Checking....Please Wait." After holding START and SELECT to tell it to go-ahead and format.

Hopefully it was just a wonky drive! The first one I tired was a 7200RPM Seagate Momentus. This second one is a slim something or other. It's half the thickness of the original 80GB. Hopefully it likes this one better. Just gotta hurry up and wait I guess!



Edit 1: Hell yeah! It is at 2% formatting! Maybe this old fatty will live again with a new 320GB HDD!

Edit 2: It's installing Rebug!!!! 2%!!

Edit 3: FML. 8002F14E code at something like 80%.

74% and it barfs. What goes?
 
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snkplkn said:
I found this video on YT.

Click to expand...

I reseated that connector. The little clip on the drive side is damaged. I think it needs a daughter board.

Any recommendations on people I can send it to to remarry and install my CFW or at least get it ready for me to do the CFW?
 
Deerhurst said:
The little clip on the drive side is damaged. I think it needs a daughter board.

Any recommendations on people I can send it to to remarry and install my CFW or at least get it ready for me to do the CFW?
Click to expand...

You only need to make BD drive work temporarily by any way you can so that you can Jailbreak. You don't really need BD drive in CFW if you have all the backups in folder or ISO format. Also, you can install no BD CFW as well if you have Jailbroken it. If i am not mistaken, you don't need BD drive at all in no BD CFW.
 
snkplkn said:
You only need to make BD drive work temporarily by any way you can so that you can Jailbreak. You don't really need BD drive in CFW if you have all the backups in folder or ISO format. Also, you can install no BD CFW as well if you have Jailbroken it. If i am not mistaken, you don't need BD drive at all in no BD CFW.
Click to expand...

It's already had the code injected for the jailbreak. Just trying to install the CFW. I have a "noBD" PUP file. It's stuck in the update loop now. Do I need to somehow exit the loop and boot to the safe mode?

No idea how to break the loop.
 
snkplkn said:
Did you get stuck in the loop while installing no BD CFW? Or were you trying to install normal CFW?
Click to expand...

Honestly I don't remember. I've been fiddling with stuff for about 6 hours now. Probably a normal CFW.

I think I'm going to re-format the HDD to NTFS and stick it back in. Hopefully that'll kick it out of the loop.
 
Got multiman and webman installed.

At dynamic 35% it's staying around 64C CPU and 55C RSX.

Am.i reading this right, this old fatty has just over 91 days of uptime!?!?!

Is the ON and OFF numbers the uptime? That's 3388 ON.
 
Berion said:
You will be unable to install any fw if BD is not married or broken (but if she trying spin the disc, it means that at least it works).
Click to expand...
Bit late replying here, but just for anyone reading this in future. You do not need a married drive to install FW.

A married drive is only required for launching apps or reading discs, ANY drive will get passed the checks during a FW install.
 
DeViL303 said:
Bit late replying here, but just for anyone reading this in future. You do not need a married drive to install FW.

A married drive is only required for launching apps or reading discs, ANY drive will get passed the checks during a FW install.
Click to expand...
I think I just proved this to be false unless you mean any working drive.

I had to use a noBD build of Rebug to get the FW to install. My drive sorta works but it's been getting worse.
 
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