PlayStation 3 hdd?

[JP]

Just had a bit of an 'incident' and I'm wondering if it could have caused some permanent damage to the hdd.

We were starting up the PS3, it just got to the orchestral music thing and the power cable was wrenched out of the back by a little 'un running around. I restarted it to be told that the hdd was corrupt and that it needed to restore it.

I've got game saves backed up so I wasn't really worried about it but wasn't looking forward to spending the next week downloading stuff again.

Anyway, I chose to restore it to find that after doing it that everything was fine and is exactly how it should have been. The games work, our IDs all work, I've tried ripping a CD to make sure that was OK and it even started recording from PlayTV as scheduled while all this was happening!

It obviously happened because of being switched off half way through booting up which is never healthy and I'm hoping that it's done the decent thing and somehow sorted itself out for us.

Have I just got lucky and everything should be fine from now on or is there likely to be further problems with the hdd? Is it likely to have damaged the hdd in any way or would it just not work at all if it had?

Cheers.

[briareos_kerensky]

Most probably unplugging the cable created an electric feedback and the HDD head stroke the disc surface or messed up some clusters and the PS3 operating system just had to do a little chkdsk (in DOS/Windows terms) to see if there were more problem than a few broken clusters.
Forecasting any other problem is rather difficult, if the PS3 runs fine in the next five power up and there are no read/write errors from the HDD I'd say everything is just fine.

[MonkeyWrench]

I had the same issue a few months back (using a 250gb drive) and I've not had any issues since, so I think it's just a precaution if the system isn't shutdown/booted up properly.

[JP]

Thanks,

I've had a mess around trying different things and it's been on and off a few times but it seems to be working perfectly.

I suppose there is the chance that I have picked up a few bad clusters but I'm sure I can afford to lose a few here & there.

[Bassman]

I had a hard disk problem a while back (250 Gb) and had to let the system sort it out. Everything was fine except the MP3's I'd got on the PS3. It seemed that whatever sort order I chose some of the "albums" would not have the tracks in the correct order.

[randombs]

Cutting the power while the hard drive is running won't cause any permanent damage if the hard drive automatically moves the heads away at the time. Most recent hard drives (by recent I think they've been around for a good few years now. Also laptop hard drives like the ones in the 360/PS3 are more resilient than desktop ones as they're designed to take a few knocks) do this as a safety precaution to stop the heads touching the disc platter when the power's gone.

The worst that could happen in that case is data loss which is what you experienced, and that was remedied by restoring (which basically formatted the hard drive and with it the data that had been corrupted by the power loss).

You say the power cable was pulled out, so did the console move when that happened? PS3's a beast so I highly doubt it but if the console was pulled along a bit with the power cable then there's a chance the hard drive could have experienced physical damage.