Hacking Can MultiMAN read an internal encrypted PS3 hdd as external USB?

[Elliander]

A while back my PS3 "died" in that it suddenly said it wanted to format the drive, when I didn't have any recent backups of saves. I'm in the process of getting all of my consoles, new and old, organized with a new setup and I'd like to know if I have any option for data recovery. I know that the PS3 hard drive is encrypted, but MultiMAN lets me browse the directory structure, so I was wondering if that might give me an option.

Suppose, for example, I put a new hard drive in there and formatted it. Then I plug the old hard drive in via a USB enclosure. Would the PS3 be able to read the external hard drive that is formatted like an internal hard drive with MultiMAN? It would be the hard drive that came out of itself, so the PS3 that's wanting to read it would be the very same PS3 that encrypted it so it's just a question of if MultiMAN is setup to access external partitions the same way it accesses internal partitions.

If a few system files are corrupt, but the user profiles are intact, this would allow me to restore everything. Then I can backup the files normally for upgrading to a Slim and then use a PC emulator for the PSX and PS2 games rather than deal with the frequent overheating of the phat that likely caused this issue to begin with.

Of course, I have no idea what files if any are still good, but I'd like to try to recover the data if at all possible.

 

[Ryccardo]

As far as I know, you can't mount a formerly internal HDD from external (except for the HDD Upgrade Tool, which doesn't do what you want, and from what I've heard is unreliable)

But if you have the eid_root_key of the console which formatted it, there is a Windows program (included in aldostools) which does indeed allow you to extract files

 

[Elliander]

OK, I found a guide here on getting the eid_root_key so will give that a try. I found aldos tools here.

It seems weird to me though that a Windows program could access it, but Multiman can't. Wouldn't multiMAN have access to the eid_root_key from the console that it's running on?

 

[Ryccardo]

Wouldn't multiMAN have access to the eid_root_key from the console that it's running on?

Not necessarily - I don't actually know how the usual key dumpers do it, but it's not necessarily a trivial file or memory copy, so it would need to be explicitly programmed in

It seems weird to me though that a Windows program could access it, but Multiman can't.

Same thing as getting the key: just because it can be done, doesn't mean someone has done it (especially given a disk connected directly to a computer via SATA or USB3 will likely give superior performance, for what is typically an one-off data recovery of possibly large volumes of files)