PSX HDD Failure

I was referring to what you did, regarding this thread. But yea, like l_Oliveira wrote, if you are going to mess around with the HDD, you should do a backup first.
If the sectors are unreadable, the HDD will probably be unusable because there doesn't seem to a way to mark bad sectors for PFS. If the bad sectors are in the way of the APA layout, then it'll be very likely to be unusable.

 

That really sucks... It has a ton of unreadable sectors now, I added a screenshot to my earlier post.

 

It likely suffered from a head crash. My first SCPH-20400 had the same death too - it originally had problems (S.M.A.R.T. failed), but one day a few tens of thousands (literally) of bad sectors opened up overnight.

I feel that you should just let the disk rest in peace. Your time is probably better spent elsewhere, rather than trying to get the PSX to accept a broken disk with certain failure.

 

has anyone tried PS2OS or toxic on the PSX?

 

Yeah, I can see it's useless to use that HDD at this point. At least I can run NTSC-J discs and .ELFs on it now thanks to you ^_^

Maybe one day we'll be able to either craft valid HDDs or use standard HDDs on the PSX, but for now mine is just a prettier NTSC-J PS2

 

It'll likely fail. The PSX has got a new evil force behind it, called the DVRP. The ATA interface is actually emulated and controlled by the DVRP.

All existing homebrew software will fail to work with its HDD unit, due to an apparent design flaw in this interface. It doesn't hide the fact that the disk supports 48bit LBA, but yet denies access to the region beyond the "lba28" (40.0GB on all units, by default). The remainder of the disk is accessed through the DVRP, via the "dvr_hdd" and "dvr_pfs" devices.

 

It's a real shame that the PSX systems are such a pain because they are really cool.
Sony made it poorly from the beginning, a lot of users had their system brake down in the first year.
This could've been the Playstation equivalent of the Panasonic Q, but sadly you just can't use your PSX often if you want to preserve it.

 

I chopped mine up and drove it into the ground #yolo

Well I was writing to the disk when it lost power

 

Honestly, it pains me to see consoles like these die in the hands of people who already knew what the risks were. :/

I don't know why SCEI didn't think that it would be great to allow the firmware to be re-installed from a USB device or something, in the event where the HDD was to become corrupted. At least, I'm thankful that they got rid of this stand and the stand on the use of a proprietary HDD unit for the PS3.
They probably didn't make it impossible to change this behaviour, as the DVRP's firmware seems to be flashable. But nobody is attacking it.

So far, the FMCB tests have shown positive results. This is probably a safer version of FMCB for the PSX anyway.

 

I haven't tried the new build of FMCB yet but does it still support USB mass storage? Because there is little reason to save anything to the hdd anyway..

It's not just SCE that are odd with software, SEMC is even worse, you can't flash any other FW to a device other than what Sony say (you don't even have the option). For example if one handset has say AT&T branded FW, you can't flash the generic FW from the exact same model.

 

It still does.

Why not? The original plan was to allow users to save software onto the PSX's HDD unit since it was going to be always active anyway. If having many external storage devices was still popular, we wouldn't have moved onto HDD-based storage for consoles.

Just that, I don't think that it's a really good idea anymore. :/
Even though these consoles will always have their HDD units powered up, causing their heads to move more might not be a very good idea because some of them are very worn.

It's SONY in general. Just that we're talking about the PlayStation 2 consoles, so I mentioned SCE.
Their VAIO laptops felt bad in this way as well. Once they cease support for your laptop, you're doomed to never upgrade (even if your computer has the specs for the newer OS).

But I don't see why preventing people from flashing the wrong firmware onto a device is a bad idea. People often don't know what they're really doing, until the device is bricked. However, the way SONY does it is really a pain because you cannot get better functionality by replacing the software, even if the software is not a firmware and the effects can be reversed.

 

from the standpoint of end users bricking phones it's good but even in sony service centres you can't alter FW...
However companies like samsung let you do everything software wise, even write IMEI numbers to handsets