I've only got 5gig of space left on the 60gig hard drive my PS3 came with so I'm wanting to put in a bigger hard drive (say 250gig). There's heaps and heaps of "how tos" on the interwebs but I haven't found any of them which give me a definitive answer to the following question:

"Will I have to download all of my games/ game patches again?"

I've got quite a few downloaded games installed, including things like Burnout: Paradise City which is 3.5gig. If I have to download them all again I'll be looking at 10-30gigs of downloading. To make matters worse my current connection speed is around 260kbps because I'm hanging out in a little seaside village in Nelson.

So... has anyone done the upgrade? Did you have to re-download everything again?

It's not the size of your harddrive that counts Tama, it's how you use it

I stand to be corrected but I would have thought removing the drive and ghosting the contents onto the new drive would work fine. Works good on PCs so should be fine with PS3 data as well.

TonyT1961 wrote:I stand to be corrected but I would have thought removing the drive and ghosting the contents onto the new drive would work fine. Works good on PCs so should be fine with PS3 data as well.

That was my hopeful fall back plan if you do have to download all of the content again. I used Norton Ghost heaps back in my computer support monkey days - it's a great utility.

However I have heard rumours that once you install a hard drive on a PS3 it gets formatted by the system. So until I find someone who's successful done the transplant I'm not risking it.

Install the hard drive first then remove and ghost. Don't think the PS3 will format it again on reinstall as it should recognise it from the ESN

I've put a 250gb in mine pretty much as soon as I got it. It's simple but you need a drive to back up that data onto. then copy it off that onto the new drive.
All firware is stored in a separate memory area, not on the hdd so it's just saved games, game data and the likes that are on there. your profiles etc are also stored with the firmware.

in the system menu on the xmb there is a backup data option. you just do that.
http://www.gamespot.com/features/6176090/index.html