PS3 backup or clone of ps3 disk with original firmware

Matrix177

Matrix177

Forum Noob
I own an unmodified ps3 console. I would like to upload HFW and HEN to it. I have games on disk that I would like to keep and possibly restore later. Is it possible to clone or back up the disk. I am a novice PS3 user and would like to ask if this is possible.
 
Thank you very much.In the console I have uploaded digital versions of games I do not have discs to copy I do not want to lose these games I have ps3 slim cech3004a date code 2A with the original firmware. Uploading new firmware will not delete these games.
 
I would like to make a copy of this disk. If something went wrong and the hybrid firmware didn't work on my console.
Restore the state of the disk from before the installation of HFW and HEN. Is this possible ?
 
Matrix177 said:
I own an unmodified ps3 console. I would like to upload HFW and HEN to it. I have games on disk that I would like to keep and possibly restore later. Is it possible to clone or back up the disk. I am a novice PS3 user and would like to ask if this is possible.
Click to expand...
It is possible. You will need to remove the HDD from your PS3 and connect it to a PC (if you don't want to open your PC's case you can use a USB to SATA adapter). Your PC won't be able to actually read the files from the disk since it's encrypted (extracting the encryption key from the PS3 requires full CFW), but you can easily create a 1:1 image of the encrypted drive using the Linux "dd" command. If you ever want to restore the backup it's also done pretty much the same way (just inverse the "if" and "of" arguments of dd).

A few pitfalls -
1. You cannot create partial backups, only a full backup of the entire system.
2. The image file's size will be the size of the HDD, e.g., if your PS3 has a 320GB HDD, the backup file will be 320GB in size. Due to the encryption it is not possible to compress the file.
3. When you restore the backup you have to use either the same HDD or an HDD (or SSD) of identical size. If you try to use a smaller disk the restore process will fail, even if the actual used space is small enough to presumably fit on the destination disk. If the destination disk is larger than the original then any extra space will be lost
4. You will not be able to restore the disk if you have updated the firmware on the PS3 to a later version. Once a PS3 is updated it will never accept lower firmware versions, no matter what. The only exception is by QA-flagging it, which requires full CFW.
 
On Windows: eg. IsoBuster, DMDE and HDD Raw Copy Tool
On Linux: eg. DMDE, dd, gddrescue

@NiQ Ad4. Firmware is not installed on HDD, in case of NOR models, only some generic data. So that's not true what You did wrote.
 
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