ok, follow-up. It was the permissions which I thought I had updated the first time in filezilla but filezilla was not updating the permissions:
Command: SITE CHMOD 755 pcsx
Response: 500 Unknown command
I ended up editing the permissions in Putty with the following:
root@bleemsync:~#...
thanks, I'll take a look as soon as I have access to my PSC again later today and give an update.
FWIW: this was part of the error log so chances are it has to do with permissions:
Can't open preference file [/data/AppData/sony/ui/user.pre] for loading
saveMemcardBackup()
memcard is broken...
I'm open to suggestions!
I connected through Putty and Filezilla fine. did a backup of the PCSX file and everything looked good. The only slight difference is I grabbed the PCSX file from an fresh copy of Bleemsync 1.0 (I then tried bleemsync 1.0.1 with same effect) and overwrote the PCSX...
I essentially soft-bricked a PSC doing this. no amount of restoring the original PCSX would allow games to be booted from the stock main menu. It will flash (like it's trying to load PCSX) and then go back to the main menu. It seems like replacing the PCSX sets off some type of security flag...
I did this and now my system will not boot any games. I restored the original PCSX and still will not boot any of the internal games.
EDIT: this is fixed, please see my response/solution further down if you run into the same issue of PCSX not booting.