Fuck this shit. What the hell have I done to merit this?

Two weeks ago, my PS3 died. I sent it to Sony and got back a refurbished one (60GB SKU). Previous to all of this, I bought a new HDD for it. A 500GB Seagate SATA. When I got my new PS3 yesterday morning, I tried it and everything was working perfectly. I took my 500GB drive and put it in the console (I followed the guide on CNet). It booted just fine. When I checked the system information, it listed 417GB free out of 465GB. I thought this weird, so I decided to do a complete format.

It took over 30 hours (I started it yesterday morning). After formating is done, the console tells you to press X to restart it. I did so, and after a couple of seconds, I got a message: "Appropriate hard disk not detected." Weird I thought. I turned off the console and booted it again, and it detected it just fine (although it took a while for it to boot). I did a fast format and the same thing happened. Turn it off and on again, and it works. So if I turn off my PS3, there is a certain chance percentage that the console won't detect my hard drive. Of course, this shouldn't be. To make matters worse, one of the screws binding the HDD to the removable tray has its inside eaten and damaged; making it unremovable. Fuck me.

"http://baygeeks.com/blog/12/06/why-does-my-hard-drive-show-less-space-than-advertised/

no matter what size you get on a hard drive it will all ways show up as less in your bios or system because of hidden system files, master file tables and the nature of bits and bytes.
so your hard drive is fine there isn't a thing wrong with it or the ps3."

It doesn't detect it half the time it boots till you started messing with it *including formating it, and striping the screws on the tray* before that you said it detected it fine except it had a 40 or so gig discrepency, it sounds like its a problem with the hard drive and not the ps3 *seagate sucks*

"It doesn't detect it half the time it boots till you started messing with it *including formating it, and striping the screws on the tray* before that you said it detected it fine except it had a 40 or so gig discrepency, it sounds like its a problem with the hard drive and not the ps3 *seagate sucks*"

There was nothing wrong with your original hard drive. It was 465 to start with, but there is a difference in true size and calculated size. 1000mb's is considered a GB when in reality it's supposed to 1024mbs. That's why there is a difference. As for why you had 417, it's because that is allotted to the OS.

I found the problem. Apparently it's because my new hard drive uses SATA-II and the earlier PS3 models have a problem with them. I need to use a jumper to force the drive into SATA-I.

EDIT:

Cannot Start. The correct Hard disk was not found.

If anyone has this problem with a Seagate HDD, you need to put jumpers on the drive to force it into SATA-I. Here's a link to a very helpful thread:

http://community.eu.playstation.com/playstationeu/board/message?board.id=417&thread.id=30026&view=by_date_ascending&page=1