I recently picked up a few functioning DECR-1000As that I intend to use for developing, and was wondering if anyone had advice on how to image the factory HDDs before I put them to work. I doubt anything useful is on them but you can always hope. I use Linux hosts exclusively in that makes a difference. Thanks-
Install Multiman (or Irisman), maybe CFW if you WANTED though I don't say it would help in the long run unless you needed FW updates for some reason. Directories to check would be "games" "game_debug" and various things like such. Though you never know if something can be hidden. For normal files: -For multiman: --Once in Multiman you can hit L1/R1 til you find a UI like the XMB. Move all the way to the left til you find mmOS as an option. Press X and you'll be able to brows the contents of the HDD and copy as you desire to a FAT32 device (or NTFS with prepNTFS). Once you've copied what you feel is importantA full 1:1 copy probably wont happen due to the drive itself being encrypted, but there's some tools to make backups of the HDD that you can reimage (through the ps3) to restore whatever was backed up. -For Irisman: --Load up Irisman, adjust the screen accordingly. Hit start -> tools -> file manager. From there you can access the files on the HDD as well as have 2 windows open. To select a file (or files) use SQUARE then hit CIRCLE. Just be sure panel A is what you want copied and panel B is the destination (or swap them. Just as long as you know one is source, the other is destination). Once done hit start and select and you'll be back to the ISO selections (if applicable) and from there you can hit the PS button to return to the XMB. For game files (if found): -Multiman: --Find the main directory. If it has a name like "BCES00493" (that's one I've been working with for example) or has a plaintext name, you can push circle on the folder and create an ISO from that directory. Alternatively you can copy it in full to your device but you will likely end up with EDAT files and that's a bothersome time. Alternatively if it's detected in Multiman (without going to mmOS) you can hover over the game, hit triangle and copy to your device (if its FAT32 it will split into parts to accommodate the 4GB file restrictions - game.iso.0 game.iso.1 etc). -Irisman --Go to the file browser, find the directory. Hit SQUARE to select it, followed by CIRCLE to give the command. You can save the directory as an ISO file on your connected device (again like multiman, it will split if needed). I haven't tried directly copying the contents of a folder yet so I may try that at some point to see if any EDAT files are generated. If you need to combine the ISO parts (if you found any) use "PS3ISO TOOLS". Personally I like version 2.1 so I recommend that one. It's on windows so I'm also not sure if this would be useful to you even if running under wine. If it's not you can create the ISO on the HDD and ftp the single ISO over. Once that's out of the way, you can wipe the drives the following way. Enter recovery mode (I dont know personally on going about doing this. Could be the same as a normal PS3, but I dont know.) pick option 5 "Restore PS3 System". This will wipe the data on the drive and have it start fresh. Upon next reboot it will format the drive to work with the tool.
Can't you just hook the hdds up to your pc and boot into norton ghost and make a drive image that way?
Thanks for the info. I wasn't aware that the drives were encrypted by default, that might slow me down a bit. I'm still going through the SDK documentation at the moment, but do you know the encryption/volume management methods Sony employed? The only Windows machine I have at the moment is a MPB running 8.1 that I use for IDA. I could use dd in Linux I supposed but I was hoping to capture all the blocks on the device, regardless of whether they were referenced by an inode (or the corresponding NTFS structure) or not. I have worked on recovering ext2 information in this manner before with mixed success. However if the drives were encrypted it is probably beyond my skill level.
You don't need windows for norton ghost. It comes with a bootable cd image. You burn that image to a cdr or to usb stick and boot off of that. It will boot you into an autonomous version of norton (based on winnt iirc). It's main purpose is of course to be used in recovery scenarios but is also supposed to be good because of minimal interference that an actual OS and it's software would normally do.
Again, the issue using Norton Ghost (also ew Norton lol) is that the HDD would still be encrypted so it wouldn't be able to make an image of the HDD anyway if you used Norton Ghost. Take a small read here about the whole HDD encryption for the ps3 http://www.ps3devwiki.com/ps3/HDD_Encryption as well as this which is about as close as you can get for mounting the HDD on a PC (in linux) http://www.psdevwiki.com/ps3/Mounting_HDD_on_PC It's a lengthy process but If you're a linux guy I'm sure this shouldn't be an overly big task. Whether you can actually use the dd command or other commands to clone the contents I cant say how far you'd get.
I would like to recommend downloading HDDRawCopy1.10Portable.exe This is a simple but good raw hdd dumping software. Downside is it will scan the hdd from beginning to the end even if your hdd is only 1% occupied. It can take a lot of time for a large hdd but it guarantee everthing is dumped. Please note that the backup is only usable on your own DECR-1000A, the hdd is per console key encrypted won't work on other systems.
