PS5 PS5 External Hard Drive Data Recovery?

[techwiz]

Hello,

I have a 4TB external hard drive that was formatted by a PS5 and used to store games on. One day, the games stopped being detected by the PS5, but it still sees that the drive is connected and can even tell me how much of the drive is being used, free space left, etc. It just doesn't show the games that are stored on it.

First thing I did was to boot the PS5 to Safe Mode and then did a Repair Console Storage while the external drive was connected. This completed, but had no effect. I then rebooted to Safe Mode again and chose the Rebuild Database option, this also had no effect.

I then connected the external drive to a PC and discovered that inside the hard drive enclosure is a Hitachi branded hard drive, so I used SeaTools to run a diagnostic scan on the drive and it reported that the drive was fine. I then used CrystalDiskInfo and it also reported that the drive was fine.

So it seems to me like the external hard drive is physically alright, but some data on it has become corrupt and is no longer able to be read by the PS5. I wanted to see if it was possible to recover the games from the external drive using PC software, reformat the drive with the PS5, and then restore any recovered games back to the freshly formatted external drive.

I currently have the drive connected to a PC and am creating an image of it using R-Studio, but once the image is created, I don't know if I will be able to do anything with that data because I understand that the PS5 encrypts data but I don't know if that applies to external drives as well. Not to mention, the corruption that the drive currently has could be one of those saved games for all I know and even if it was possible to recover the game data, I could be restoring corrupted data back to a freshly formatted drive and find myself in the exact same scenario I started with. I don't really know.

I just wanted to see if it was possible or if I am wasting my time trying to recover with R-Studio and should just give up because it's impossible, reformat the external drive, and be done with it?

Thank you for any help/advice in advance.

 

[Berion]

Hello,
and welcome on a forum.

Only reliable quick test is investigation of parrams counted by S.M.A.R.T. Many tools displaying them for user in some color buttons, "fine" summaries etc. but You should check each anyway by Yourself (You can paste it here).

As far as I know, external drive for PS4/PS5 is encrypted. If You can paste here screenshot from HxD from LBA 0 (first sector) and eventually from LBA 2048 (this first after GPT if GPT is also used on external) then we will know for sure. In top menu "Additional", choose "Open Disk" (in read only mode). Administrative privileges are mandatory for that task.

If encrypted, You will not recover any data from it without decrypting first. And to do that, we need to know static keys, seeds and algo used for it. So far, those are unknown. So if PS5 saying that drive is broken (broken logic structure), You have no choice but format it and loose everything.