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- Sep 16, 2011
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- elliander.etherealspheres.com
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Hi, I am going through the motions of a PS3 repair.
When I last played my PS3 FAT , which was a few years ago at least, I was having some overheating issues which indicated that it needed new thermal paste, but before I could schedule to have that done one of the crashes led me to a message about a corrupted drive. I wasn't willing to reformat it, as that would have resulted in a total loss of saved games and profiles, so I ended up putting it into storage. I kept it in a sealed container to prevent moisture infiltration and kept it in the basement to minimize temperature fluctuations.
Recently I actually had time to work on it, and more importantly I learned of a tool that would let me decrypt the drive if I dump the eid_root_key. So, I put a new "1 TB Samsung V-NAND 860 QVO" SSD in and when I tried booting I ended up on a yellow light error that I never had before. So I ended up finding a local repair shop who replaced the thermal paste and the thermal pads and did a cleaning (they said the thermal paste was VERY bad, but the board itself was surpringly clean with no corrosion) and in the meantime I started to do a RAW copy of the old 620 GB drive to the new one per the information I found here. In the meantime it of course still has a YLOD error because no hard drive will also cause it. We are hopeful that it will work once I plug the new drive in (maybe the cleaning and thermal paste replacement was enough) and if that doesn't work I can try using the old drive since maybe there's a compatability issue with the new one (I never did try turning it on again with the old drive), but if that doesn't work the next step will be to try a reflow. If that fixes it even long enough to dump the eid_root_key via the tool I found here I can decrypt the drive (either the old or new, since it's cloned) using the tool I found here. That way I can migrate to a PS3 slim that won't have the heating issues whenever it dies again. (and I already purchased a modded PS2 so that I won't need a FAT model for PS1 and PS2 compatability)
So now comes the question. It was suggested that a bad chip could be the cause, and if a reflow doesn't work I will be open to replacing any part that I have to in order to get this working, but the objective here isn't a working PS3. It's data recovery. It's just that getting the PS3 working is a neccessary step to decrypt the drive. My concern here is that if the key is changed when replacing parts that will defeat the objective so I need to know what parts are safe to replace and what parts are not safe to replace. Similarly, if there is only one part that determines this, I wonder if moving that part into another PS3 (maybe a slim?) might allow the drive to be read.
I thought I dumped the keys before I put it into storage, but it's not on my PS3 external hard drive which otherwise still works fine, and I can only find a few of my saved games backed up so it's really important to me that I can recover the data.
When I last played my PS3 FAT , which was a few years ago at least, I was having some overheating issues which indicated that it needed new thermal paste, but before I could schedule to have that done one of the crashes led me to a message about a corrupted drive. I wasn't willing to reformat it, as that would have resulted in a total loss of saved games and profiles, so I ended up putting it into storage. I kept it in a sealed container to prevent moisture infiltration and kept it in the basement to minimize temperature fluctuations.
Recently I actually had time to work on it, and more importantly I learned of a tool that would let me decrypt the drive if I dump the eid_root_key. So, I put a new "1 TB Samsung V-NAND 860 QVO" SSD in and when I tried booting I ended up on a yellow light error that I never had before. So I ended up finding a local repair shop who replaced the thermal paste and the thermal pads and did a cleaning (they said the thermal paste was VERY bad, but the board itself was surpringly clean with no corrosion) and in the meantime I started to do a RAW copy of the old 620 GB drive to the new one per the information I found here. In the meantime it of course still has a YLOD error because no hard drive will also cause it. We are hopeful that it will work once I plug the new drive in (maybe the cleaning and thermal paste replacement was enough) and if that doesn't work I can try using the old drive since maybe there's a compatability issue with the new one (I never did try turning it on again with the old drive), but if that doesn't work the next step will be to try a reflow. If that fixes it even long enough to dump the eid_root_key via the tool I found here I can decrypt the drive (either the old or new, since it's cloned) using the tool I found here. That way I can migrate to a PS3 slim that won't have the heating issues whenever it dies again. (and I already purchased a modded PS2 so that I won't need a FAT model for PS1 and PS2 compatability)
So now comes the question. It was suggested that a bad chip could be the cause, and if a reflow doesn't work I will be open to replacing any part that I have to in order to get this working, but the objective here isn't a working PS3. It's data recovery. It's just that getting the PS3 working is a neccessary step to decrypt the drive. My concern here is that if the key is changed when replacing parts that will defeat the objective so I need to know what parts are safe to replace and what parts are not safe to replace. Similarly, if there is only one part that determines this, I wonder if moving that part into another PS3 (maybe a slim?) might allow the drive to be read.
I thought I dumped the keys before I put it into storage, but it's not on my PS3 external hard drive which otherwise still works fine, and I can only find a few of my saved games backed up so it's really important to me that I can recover the data.
s