Hello all,

My PS3 yellow light'd on me about 6 weeks ago and I've been looking at getting a new slim pretty soon. Could I put the old HD from my broken PS3 into an external drive caddy and plug that into my new PS3 via USB and successfully transfer all the data onto the new drive?

Thanks for any help.

Nope, if you put a hard drive into a PS3 it'll ask you to format it even if it came from a different PS3. If you use an external caddy it won't be recognized thanks to DRM. I think you're boned. Should invest in PS+ and get cloud saves next time.

Are you 100% about the DRM on the external approach, I saw a tutorial online where the person backed up all his data onto an external HD, then transferred it to his new PS3 via that same external HD. If not, that really sucks I've got some pretty valuable saves on there.

Does anyone know a way around it?

It might depend on which PSN update you have installed on the hard drive from the broken PS3. Mine broke in January 2010 and it won't transfer but my firmware on that hard drive is so old it still has Linux capabilities.

@JTB123 said:

Hello all,

My PS3 yellow light'd on me about 6 weeks ago and I've been looking at getting a new slim pretty soon. Could I put the old HD from my broken PS3 into an external drive caddy and plug that into my new PS3 via USB and successfully transfer all the data onto the new drive?

Thanks for any help.

you might be able to still acces it via the normal transfer way try it

http://manuals.playstation.net/document/en/ps3/current/settings/transferutility.html

@Grillbar: That requires the old PS3 to work so I won't be able to do that.

If your original PS3 isn't functional, you're pretty much fucked.

The internal hard drive is tied to that specific ps3, and the data on there will not work with anything else. There are ways to transfer the data but the ps3 has to be working for you to do that. Since it is already busted you might as well try and fix it yourself. The fix for the yellow light is only temporary, but should give you enough time to get the saves and maybe do a full backup to a external hard drive.

@Lego_My_Eggo: What about taking out the new PS3 HD and transferring all the data from the old one to that using a PC, seeing as that new drive will be tied to the new PS3, could that work? Or does simply removing the drive screw anything up?

@JTB123: The problem is that the old HD can only be read by that busted ps3, a PC will not even see that there is anything on there, so you have to fix that ps3 if you want those saves. And since it is already busted there is no real harm in just trying to see if you can fix it. If you get it working you can simply copy them to a thumb drive for the unlocked saves, but for locked saves you need to do a full backup/transfer with the options in the settings.

Unless you are a subscriber to PS+ and you uploaded your saves to the cloud, you wont be able to access your saves etc... You could try the YLOD fix then backup your HDD. That what my friend did she followed the guide on youtube and that fixed the YLOD problem long enough for her to backup her saves.