A friend of mine from a software company sent me a 160gb HDD from a prototype PS3, the ones in a transparent black case, no serial number or markings on it apart from 'Prototype - For Evaluation only', the machine was broken and returned to Sony. The drive I've been told does have things on it but on a PC it's coming up as an unallocated drive and asks me to format it on a PS3. Any idea if I could dump the contents for possible future use?
PS3 HDDs are encrypted, you could try one of the ways floating around the net for decrypting it, then you can take a closer look at it's contents.
The methods availible for decrypting the drive uses the PS3 it came from, so you can not get it decrypted without the PS3.
I would like to find some free software so I can dump the contents of the drive to a file so if in the future someone finds a way to crack the PS3 HDD encryption then I can use the contents of the drive in the future.
You can use dd. E.g.: You can also try cpio. Most programs out there deal with mounted filesystems, not raw data, but dd should work.
Because the SATA controller has hardware encryption and the key is unique per console. Without the console it came from, the data is useless.
