My PS3 has been down for months, Does the hard drive marry to the motherboard? I replaced the heat paste then it went out again. When I took it to a store I was told the motherboard was burned out, I havent opened it yet. What am I looking for when I do?

What Im trying to figure out is, can I buy a motherboard from any PS3? Do they have to be from the same model? Are they hard to put into the system? My first step is open it and replace the paste. If that doesn't work then I might need a motherboard?

Im not really sure what Im doing. But I see no reason to buy a new PS3 if i can fix this one.

sounds very complicated, when you start talking about having to put in money to attempt a home repair, I would instead just recommend contacting sony and paying the 100$ or so for an out of warranty repair, sounds less stressful to me.

If you're not sure what you are doing, I suggest you stop throwing money away on repairs that may or may not work and just buy a replacement. Try Craigslist, PS3's are a dime a dozen right now.

I can't really imagine a situation where replacing the thermal paste would cause the system to work where it would otherwise not, unless the problem was that it was booting and running for a while, THEN shutting down due to overheating. If the system doesn't work at all and you're just getting a yellow light when you try to turn it on, it's most likely that the solder that connects either the CPU or the GPU to the motherboard has cracked and one or more of the pins has lost contact.

If this is the problem, there is a fix known as reflowing, but it's fairly involved, requires some bits and pieces that most people might not have handy such as a heat gun and it's really only generally going to be a temporary fix.

Just getting a motherboard from another system or whatever won't really be a huge help as the harddrive is indeed paired to the system and if the hdd is connected to a different motherboard etc, it will just want to format and wipe everything off the drive, rather than giving you access to that stuff. There is also a circuit board attached to the bottom of the bluray drive that is also paired to the specific motherboard, just to make things more of a hassle.

How desperate are you to keep game saves? Because I think just replacing the system might be the best option.

I replaced the thermal paste and the system worked for about four months, which is a typical time frame. If I get another system will the PS3 format the harddrive on its own? or do I need to format thru a computer? I would like my saves but I dont see that as realistic. What all of you are saying is throw this one away? I cant save it at all? If I buy a 12GB and put the 500GB in there I will be fine? Im going in circles here because Im being stubborn and refuse to throw the PS3 away, I want to fix it. This PS3 can be saved, but not by me.

Yeah, the PS3 should take care of the format automatically.

The only thing is that the harddrives in PS3s sit in these little metal caddies and since the 12gb systems don't actually have harddrives (it's just flash storage), they don't actually come with one of those, so you'll need to get one of those too.

If you can actually get the original system working for a little bit, there are ways to transfer between systems. So if you could do that, you could just transfer from the old system to the internal 12gb of the new system, and then switch the harddrive over. At that point, it would want to reformat, but it gives you the choice to actually migrate what is on the internal storage to the harddrive.