It happens to a lot of people. Your console dies and the only thing you can do about it is get online and piss and moan about it in a forum.

This is that thread:

So, the Xbox 360 (at least the old model) is prone to crapping out quite frequently. I've known people who've been through several of them. And I've been lucky to have mine work with nothing more than a few hang ups now and then. And you know what? Despite it being the older model, it is still running just fine. This thread, is about my PS3. A PS3 that has already crapped out on my once and needed to be reformatted to work again... losing all my game saves, DLC, and PSN game data in the process.

So my PS3 has been quietly sitting powered off all day. And that evening, I go to turn it on. Fans spin up.... then stop and powers back off. It then beeps three times flashes yellow once, and then just constantly flashes red (YLOD?). Looking online yields nothing. It's one of two things: Heating or bad hard drive connection. Seeing as it had been off all day, I can easily rule out heating. And after having reseated the hard drive, it does the exact same thing. In fact, leaving the drive completely out of the console and turning it one makes it do the exact same thing. So it is either the console its self, or the hard drive. I'm thinking the former.

So, what do you do when your Xbox dies? Assuming you don't say 'f*ck it' and don't replace it, you either repair it or send it off to get replaced by M$. But what do you do with your hard drive? You slam it in the new one and pick up right were you left off. BUT NOT WITH SONY! Oh, no. That would be convenient. You see, Sony was too worried about piracy. So once a hard drive is formatted to a single PS3, it is bound to it. You put it in another PS3 and it will ask you to format the drive before it'll work properly. So even if my hard drive is perfectly fine, the data is still lost. THANKS SONY!

Oh, and don't even ask me if I could get warranty work on it. It's one of the original models... you know, the PS2 backwards compatible ones. That means any warranty is laughably gone. Not to mention that I just lost my PS2 backwards compatibility since Sony took that out. THANKS SONY!

And this happened around the time that Sony just lost all my personal data to hackers including my user name and login to PSN, my name and home address, e-mail address, and possibly even my credit card information. THANK YOU SO VERY MUCH SONY!

So yeah, feel free to get mad at the Xbox for dying... but at least with it you can recover you data. And M$ hasn't ever lost anyone's personal information either. I think I'll take a dead console or two over this sh*t any day.

Have you thought about sending this message directly to them? I fully understand it may be futile. On the other hand they have such bad PR these days that maybe if you asked or demanded them to fix it for free (since it is one of the backwards compatible ones) maybe they would be willing to even without the warranty. Also while it seems highly unlikely, maybe they have a way of transferring data from drive to drive. I know with M$ you don't have to reformat the drive but you also can't just plug it into any 360 (also to avoid piracy), it has to be associated with it somehow. I'm not sure exactly what they do but when my 360 needed to be replaced (even though I kept the hard drive as instructed) they had to on their end update all this info so my hard drive would be compatible with the new console they were sending me. Maybe Sony has in house ways to control the data transfer that the user doesn't.

Firstly, I know you can move a hard drive from one Xbox to another with no issue. Not only is it commonly know, but ShadowFox has been doing that from Xbox to Xbox for a while now as his original one busted and he's been doing that with his room mate's Xbox till he gets his own again.

And that aside, I hardly see how this would be exploitable by pirates anyways. So what if you get it from one console to another. Once you take it out of the original, it doesn't stay there. There's no copied data. Moving something from one place to another isn't piracy... it's just moving data.

Anyways, I'm going to see if I can't get at least something going. I'm pretty sure Sony has a lot on it's plate right now seeing as their security breech is a bigger priority than me. And I'd rather them put that ahead of everything else because I'd rather not look in my bank account and find it empty.

I've really been dreading something like that happening to me. I have one of the older backwards compatible PS3s too. It would be a pain to replace - especially since I'm not the one who plays is. So I'd basically be shelling out money for something I'll never use.

And Sony has really done a lot to make me lose respect for them. The PSN breech not withstanding, the removal of the Other OS feature, their lock-down of PS3 HDDs, removal of backwards compatibility, etc. was more than enough reason for me to switch exclusively to PC-only gaming (with perhaps a little hand-held thrown in to fill in the gaps).

Never had your identity/account info stolen before? It's happened to me a few times. "overdraft notice" are my two least favorite words in the English language, right below to "voluptuous breasts" and "low-fat mayonnaise" (both of which also happen to be on my list of top ten things I don't ever want to find in my bed).

Regardless, contacting Sony is probably the best way to get the problem fixed. If they refuse, and your identity is stolen, life ruined, etc., then you would make a great person to lead the class action suit against them. A tragic hero fighting against corporate oppression and arrogance.

In short: That sucks. Hope you manage to get it all working.

Maybe you can take it to a locally owned game store. They tend to be more willing to do repairs than any other people I know. Or you could get a refurbished PS3 from GameStop.

I spent the better part of today looking into it. The first night of searching really didn't bring up anything as no one really seemed to know what they were talking about. But it seems that after finding these two guys in particular, they seem to know what's up. It'll require me take the PS3 clean apart, and focus a heat gun on key areas. I think I'm more willing to try this instead of dealing with Sony. I'm going to do a bit more research on this before I go with it though.

Back in my day, game consoles didn't break down. Not without smashing it, or shooting it with a flaming crossbow. And any game console that didn't work for other reasons simply were shoddy right out of the box. But if it worked out of the box, it stayed working.

*has a still-functional Nintendo 64, Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, NES, and Atari 2600*
*at worst, you just have to jiggle the cartridge in these a little to get them to work*

So, last Tuesday, I talked about looking into repairing my PS3. Until Friday, I was doing a lot of research on what the problem was and what I needed to do to fix it. Out of all the things I needed, I was only missing said heat gun, which I was able to pick up for twenty bucks at Home Depot (because of my job, the thermal paste and T10 screw driver were easy enough to get).

So two days ago, I got to work. And this is what my PS3 looked like half way through:



The board on the bottom left is where the problem was. Those two processors and near-by chipsets had cracked soldering. And what I needed to do was get a heat gun on them and heat the solder back to it's liquid form and then let it cool. This is apparently called reflowing. The most important thing about it was that after you heated the board, you absolutely could not touch it for about 20 minutes. With the solder in its liquid form, any bump or nudge would move the chips on the board, move connections from the traces on the board, and cross something that would just fry the thing if you put it all together and turned it on.

But all of this work paid off because it freaking worked. I put it all back together and my PS3 is working again. I now can fix YLOD PS3s. This really doesn't settle things with Sony though.

Again say what you want about 360's faulty hardware. But I'd rather have 2 or more consoles burn up (assuming I didn't get a slim model that doesn't break) and replace them with SOME of my money then have my damn credit card information stolen and lose ALL of my money. Not to mention you can't move a hard drive from one PS3 to another if you PS3 gets YLOD. It might be less common than RROD, but with the 360, you can always recover you data.

Data and personal banking information > hardware... just sayin'

CONGRATS!!!

Doesn't it feel great to do it yourself? I love the feeling after fixing a console myself.

Glad that you were able to keep your save data. Losing save data on a big game would kill it for me. Knowing I would never be able to get just how it was before and that I would have to redo it all up to that point before enjoying the end... I'd likely just shelve it.

Yeah, the FIRST thing I did was throw a USB drive in there and copy every last save I had on the console. And I'm going to be doing that every so often. Though I don't know how long this fix will be. Some people say it can last as long as 8 months and some say a week. Knowing my luck, I'm in the latter group. But like you said, I at least got my data now.

I hope those copied saves will be transferrable.

Well, seeing as most have limited success with the fix you managed, perhaps you should take advantage of GameStop's current deal.


With the newer FWs, you could connect two PS3s directly via ethernet and go under system settings. There should be an option to move the data. Not sure if this is new info or not but it is all I could find.

I'm pretty sure this will be useless in the case of a dead console (even if the hard drive is perfectly fine).

And as a little update, I would like to make it known that I have set a new record for shortest time after fixing a YLOD PS3 at a whopping 5 days. Today it died again. YLOD of course. I don't think this is a fix I'm going to want to repeat every 5 days either. So screw this. I won't be considering a new PS3 until Uncharted 3. So don't expect to see my on PSN.

Oh, wait, you won't anyways... PSN's been down for the past month because Sony is ran by a bunch of headless chickens! So instead of loging onto PSN, I'd better log into my online bank account and make sure everything is still accounted for. A lovely new routine I picked up a month again.

I know. That's why I suggested you buy another before your current one breaks. The damned thing just couldn't last until then I guess lol

Oh, no worries about that. I already got all my game saves and virtual memory cards. So I'm good on that end.

^Good work, Lanti.