Advice on changing the PS3 hard drive

[Maximum Bert]

I have just bought a 500gb hard drive to upgrade my old 60 gb model because I am sick of deleting stuff and quite frankly what I have now on there now I really want to keep.

My question however is in using an external hard drive to back up and restore the system once I install the new drive. I really only have one external hard drive with the space left but its got a load of my work from PC on which is a tad more important than game saves.

So PS3 uses FAT32 apparently while the PC uses an NTSC system so im taking it I cant use that drive without formatting it is that correct or is there a way around it maybe partitioning it somehow? I dont want to really buy another external hard drive just to backup the PS3 and then have it be useless for anything else but is that what I am going to have to do?

Apologies if this sounds dumb but I would appreciate it if someone in the know could help me out ive tried searching the net but cant seem to find a straight answer I know when I used a USB to save some 360 saves it rendered the stick useless for anything else.

 

[Catfood220]

Can't you back the data on your external hard drive up on something else, then use that hard drive to back up your stuff on the PS3. Once you have changed the hard drive and put everything back on the PS3, format the external hard drive and put all your work data back onto it.

You could just do what I did. Save all your game save data to PS+ (a one month subscription is quite cheap) change the hard drive, download the latest update from the Sony website onto a memory stick (instructions on what to do are there), install that and then download all your game save data, reinstall all your games, download all your games and stuff from the store. You can get your PSN ID and friends lists back easily and trophys will sync back onto your PS3.

Yeah, its a huge pain in the arse, but that's what I had to.

 

[Maximum Bert]

I suppose I could borrow a hard drive from a friend or even get them to store the data on their PC for me while I do that hmmm such a pain in the ass. Thanks for the help I think I need to get access back to my account though first otherwise I can see complications in the future.

I wish I could just plug an external hard drive in and it works that would be way better. That PS+ idea may be the way though if I cant get access to another hard drive as im sure it will be cheaper than buying a new one just for this.