Once the PS3 boots up it will prompt to format the drive, which does not take long at all. Now, if you are feeling adventurous, I would go back to System Settings in the XMB and go to the Format Utility and format the drive with 10 GB for "OtherOS." Then you can install Linux on the drive. I would suggest Yellow Dog Linux 6.0.
Otherwise, head back to the Backup Utility you used before and this time select Restore. Once the restore function is complete, all your games, downloads, messages, everything, will be back on your PS3. You can check the hard drive size by going to System Information under System Settings.
The 320 GB drive I installed comes to 300 GB of usable space once formatted. Now I do not have to worry about downloading demos or having to delete previous game cache files to play the next game. Life is great. And it didn't cost me a fortune either.
I hope all games are not like this, but I found out that Hot Shots Golf: Out of Bounds will not launch when there is a saved game on the hard drive but no cache file. It goes right back to the XMB when you try to play it, with no error message at all. Once I backed up my saved game to my external USB drive, and deleted it from the internal one, the game launched like normal and went through the cache install. That is a bit irritating. I have a lot of games to install, and I hope they do not all behave this way.
Article comments
1 - lilmdawg
Yeah this is much better than 360!!! When seagate comes out with 1tb in 2.5" in 2009 i'm so going to update my 80gb!!
2 - True
I upgraded my 60gb drive to a 250gb which I only paid $99 for. The install was simple. Beats paying $180 for a 120gb xbox drive.
3 - Ken Edwards
It sure does. The price for the 120 GB drive is insane. I bought an Elite because it cost me *less* to trade in my Premium and get the Elite with the 120 GB drive than it would have been for me to just purchase the 120 GB drive separately.
A little DIY goes a long way, thankfully Sony was thinking the same thing when they put the PS3 together.
4 - Tim
I am so gonna install a samsung spinpoint m6 500gb when they start selling them over here!!
5 - Joe
"When seagate comes out with 1tb in 2.5" in 2009" - lilmdawg.... do you know what month this is coming out
6 - random
Remember! When you back up your PS3, make sure it is a 30gig Microsoft Windows Fat32 partition on the USB disk and not something modern, like ext2, ext3, ext4, reiserfs, reiserfs4, xfs, jfs, or any other F/S that is free to use and can use more than 30gigs of disk space.
7 - Ken Edwards
Yes it has to be FAT 32. I thought I said that. It is a real pain in the rear using such an old format, especially if you have more than 30 GB to back up, like I did. I had to re-download a lot.
8 - everett pressley
can I play my ps2 games on ps3 after the HDD upgrade?