PS3 Phat - Possible Hard Drive Failure?

Hello Peeps!
Had a bit of a problem with my PS3 over the last few days that i believe might be the Hard Drive failing, but thought i'd ask on here as i don't have much experience with PS3 faults.

It's a PS3 Phat (40gb model, 2008) and i upgraded the HD to 320gb about 2 years ago.

So, Sunday night i switch on the PS3 from cold and i got the YLOD (beeps, yellow light then flashing red) then i switch it off from the back and switched back on again, it booted fine then i continued to watch a 2 hour DVD with no problem.

Last night, i switched the PS3 on again from cold and got another YLOD, same thing, switched off the power and rebooted, all working fine.

Thought i'd do a little test to see if the motherboard/chips are failing - Started Wipeout HD to give it a play and stress out the system, but there was an update to download, as soon as the download started the system switched off! i tried this process about 2-3 times and got the same power off every time.

Eventually i got the update to download but it seemed to 'stall' all the way through it (timer kept on increasing, no progress) but did download eventually.

Anyway, finally got into the game and played about an hour, no problems what-so-ever. The watched a DVD for over 3 hours, also had no problems.

Did another test by downloading a trailer from the PS Store, again, same 'stalling' problem.

Does this sound like a HD problem to you?

 

Well, It STILL seems like the issue is with the mainboard. Powering on the PS3 barely 5mins, The RSX and CELL CPU chips can easily reach 70 degrees in temp, and that the paste that sony used would have dried up over a period of time. Thus overheating or the expansion/ warping of the board thus shutting down the unit due to abnormal failure.

 

Try a game that has an option to copy content to the HDD. If the same thing happens then it's probably the drive, as it seems to run fine when running from optical media like you said.

 

The YLOD happens immediately, not even on for 5 seconds, before any image appears on screen. no boot at all untill i power off and back on.

I will take the drive out later and put it in an old laptop and run a HD diagnostics.

EDIT: Tested it with another hard drive - same problem.... time for a new PS3 then i guess....

 

YLOD = Syscon panic (something went wrong and it shut down in panic)

YLOD is a generic error behavior. It doesn't tell you what is wrong.

And in 80% of the cases (in non tampered consoles) the cause is the GPU that has cracked joints.