PS1/2 My PS2 is freezing at startup.

ActC00l

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I'm not sure what's causing this and I have no ability to repair the system assuming it's a problem with the board. It's a bit odd that it freezes at different times, each time. Sometimes it's at the screen where it has the PS2 startup noise. Sometimes it's within the OPL menu. But it happens repeatably. My question is, what do you think the problem may be? Is it the PS2? Could it be the a/v or power cables? It's a fat PS2 with a 3.5 SATA hdd inside. I tried taking the memory card with free mcboot out of the system, and I discovered it can still freeze going off of HDD mcboot. Please help and thanks for reading.
 

Hayato213

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You can try to narrow down your list of suspects, by installing Free MCboot on the Memory card, and checking the HDD health on a computer with software like crystaldiskinfo. If the PS2 shut down without the HDD and the Memory card connected, it might be the motherboard that is the issue.
 

Snomannen_kalle

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I'm not sure what's causing this and I have no ability to repair the system assuming it's a problem with the board. It's a bit odd that it freezes at different times, each time. Sometimes it's at the screen where it has the PS2 startup noise. Sometimes it's within the OPL menu. But it happens repeatably. My question is, what do you think the problem may be? Is it the PS2? Could it be the a/v or power cables? It's a fat PS2 with a 3.5 SATA hdd inside. I tried taking the memory card with free mcboot out of the system, and I discovered it can still freeze going off of HDD mcboot. Please help and thanks for reading.
Do you have a modchip installed? I've had issues using with FHDB freezing with my Matrix Infinity before, usually in the browser or earlier. I never found a fix, but FMCB works fine so I've been using that instead
 

rs1n

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If there is an internal hard drive then most likely the drive is failing. Take it out and connect it to you computer. Use HDD Scan or CrystalDisk (both free) to check the SMART attributes. If the drive is an older IDE drive then it is very likely the drive has surpassed its lifespan.
 
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slaphappygamer

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To check if it has a chip, hold L1,L2,R1,R2 while you boot the console. You should enter a settings screen if a chip is present. I had issues with freeHDDboot as well. You can use WINHIIP to check the drive for bad blocks on your drive. When connecting your drive to your pc, remember to have the drive in "slave" mode.
 
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Spider_Man

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I'm not sure what's causing this and I have no ability to repair the system assuming it's a problem with the board. It's a bit odd that it freezes at different times, each time. Sometimes it's at the screen where it has the PS2 startup noise. Sometimes it's within the OPL menu. But it happens repeatably. My question is, what do you think the problem may be? Is it the PS2? Could it be the a/v or power cables? It's a fat PS2 with a 3.5 SATA hdd inside. I tried taking the memory card with free mcboot out of the system, and I discovered it can still freeze going off of HDD mcboot. Please help and thanks for reading.
remove everything so its a standard ps2 and see if it boots.

dont know why you have the hdd and memory card configured with fmbc, just use the memory card and keep the hdd for isos.
 

rs1n

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Nope it's a SATA.

Whether or not it's SATA makes no difference. Check the drive for any signs of physical failure. SATA drives at least have SMART attributes that can easily be checked.

To check if it has a chip, hold L1,L2,R1,R2 while you boot the console. You should enter a settings screen if a chip is present. I had issues with freeHDDboot as well. You can use WINHIIP to check the drive for bad blocks on your drive. When connecting your drive to your pc, remember to have the drive in "slave" mode.

Winhiip -- especially its bad blocks scan (or worse, its "defragmentation" operation) -- is one of the worst things to use. If you happen to have games whose partitions are named similarly, there is a very high chance that Winhiip will cause even more damage. Partition names have a limited number of characters, and Winhiip will stupidly overwrite children partitions of similarly named games on top of each other due to this limit.
 
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