PS2 PS2 saying hard drive is no longer formatted.

Mi5KL

Mi5KL

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Year Later Update TL;DR: Check your expansion port for broken pins!

Fat PS2, FMCB, OEM network adaptor with a sata upgrade kit, 1TB western digital, I think the drive was initially formatted in ulaunch but it's been a while.
It's worked fine for like 2 years and now suddenly won't read the hard drive anymore. Took the drive out to put a patched game on it, but realized I needed to delete the game through OPL first and when I put it back in it wasn't being read.

The ulaunchelf HDDmanager reads it as connected but not formatted, and it spins up. HDLBatch and WinHIIP are both still listing the games on it, I tried repairing the drive in WinHIIP for good measure and still no dice in the PS2. I don't really wanna copy like 800 gigs of games onto my computer to format the drive and put them back after since PC end seems to say everything is fine.

Anybody dealt with this? I'm assuming plugging and unplugging the network adaptor has blown something on the sata board, but I'm not entirely sure since it's still spinning up at least.
 
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I had only downloaded WinHIIP because I saw someone else say that it's repair function helped them fix a similar issue, not for installing games or anything. I gave PFS BatchKit a shot but I really prefer having more of a GUI, unless HDLBatch is whats causing the issues here.

I was able to format a second hard drive on the PS2 (HDDmanager) but when I moved it to my PC to try putting a game on it HDLB gave me an error, formatting it on PC and putting it back in the PS2 gave me the same Connected Yes/Formatted No error the first hard drive has.

Formatting the second drive with the PS2 again, and just turning it off and on again and checking it in HDDmanager again, I'm seeing that it at least thinks it's still formatted correctly, but most of the partitions are missing (imgur: /7x5J8r9.png), so I think something is going wrong on the adaptor end.

Here's the hex view of the first drive, sorry I can't post direct links.
imgur: /XLbsdOj.png

Since the second drive didn't work I'm assuming it's the sata board, but it's still surprising to me that it's managing to format the drive at all even if it's clearly doing it wrong.
 
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You cannot format PS2 HDD on PC by anything else than dedicated tools. Windows not supporting APA, PS2 fw not supporting MBR/GPT.

On Your screen, You have mixed environment. Maybe it fools some apps. Do zeroing LBA2 and see if that helps. If not, then recalculate checksum for "__mbr" partition attribute area and update it. If You overwritten APA journal (LBA8+) then drive is only for formatting.
 
The second drive was formatted correctly on my PC via HDLBatch, not with default windows tools, so I imagine the PS2 would've recognized it. The PS2 formatting the drive incorrectly when I tried again afterwards seems to tell me that it's probably an adaptor issue especially since it isn't reading the drive the same after a reboot.

Still not sure if it's with the SATA board or the network adaptor, but it's cheaper to just check with a new SATA kit, though I have no idea what might have busted it in the first place.
 
So I went ahead with buying a second SATA kit, and the issue is exactly the same, I thought it might be worth getting a video of what happens when I try and format the HDD with the PS2 though:


Is this something that could be indicative of a blown fuse in the PS2? or something with the network adaptor? I've looked into a few posts about a blown PS9 fuse in regards to losing hard drive functionality, but I haven't seen anything exactly like this.
 
Actually it is formatted (which should taking few seconds, not minutes), but You don't have all base partitions. Which means this procedure cannot be trusted (it should works of course).

It is not a fuse blow because HDD wouldn't be recognized as connected.

Paste S.M.A.R.T of that HDD here.
 
I assume this is all the necessary info?
https://i.imgur.com/wQfuRe5.png

I still think it's interesting that after the PS2 (incorrectly) formats the hard drive, it lists all the correct partitions until you close it out and check it again. Like I said previously, I've used programs on my PC to format it correctly and then the console can't read it.

Apparently there's 2 fuses relevant to the network adaptor, could this be just one of them blown and not the other? Just trying to rule out the PS2 itself, because if it isn't that or the SATA board then it might be the network adaptor itself.
 
Based on attached S.M.A.R.T short test, no bad sectors or mechanical problems. Disk is fine.

Issue is on NA side, the question is in what exactly and why. I dunno. Especially that behavior is very strange.
 
So I replaced the network adaptor with a new one, and the same issue is still happening. Fuses or not I think it must be an issue on the PS2's end. It doesn't seem like a common enough network adaptor issue to happen to both of mine, or else I think we'd recognize it.

I flushed out the NA port with contact cleaner on both ends and still nothing, I think my next plan will be trying to replace the fuses to make sure
 
I don't know if this is related or not, but a similar situation happened to me on PS3 a few days ago... I installed an .ISO on my NTFS drive and it wasn't being recognized (althought still connected) anymore until I ran a test with the Mini Tool Partition Wizard. It located a problem within the drive and fixed it, freeing like 20 GB in the process that were simply gone for some reason. After that my PS3 started reading the HDD again. Maybe try that program to see if it finds anything? Might be a long shot, though.
 
Ripto said:
Can you try another hard drive to confirm its not the adapter?
Winhiip is frowned upon, it can create problems.
I would recommend PFS-BatchKit-Manager, which you can find here if you decide to start fresh or make additional changes:
Click to expand...

Bro you are a legend, I use this for everything now. its like a all in one tool for hhds
 
1 year and 5 months later I finally got around to replacing the fuses in the PS2, to find basically the same issue before finally deciding to Actually Look in the expansion port and notice that part of the port is broken and a pin is bent.

This is probably not fixable, not by me anyway, can't seem to find replacement parts or anything and it looks Much More soldered to the board than the fuses were. It looks like some PS2 models have a different, less fragile looking port so I'll probably try and get one of those models.
 
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