Headaches with Playstation 3

This is a post that hopefully will help other people who had the same issue I had this week.

I was downloading the game Trash Panic from the american Playstation Store. Left it downloading for an hour or so and went do something else. When I came back to check the download, it was at 42% and wouldn't download any more. It tried for a few seconds, displayed "Pending" instead of "Downloading" for half a second and then tried downloading again. So I realized something was wrong. I tried cancelling the download, and that's when everything started...

The PS3 froze up. Nothing would move in the screen, I couldn't go back to the XMB from the download item. Holding the PS button on the controller, though, worked, so I tried turning it off. The screen went black, the green light in the PS3 started flashing and wouldn't turn off. I left it flashing for a long time, and nothing. So I had to turn the power off manually in the back of the PS3.

When I turned it on again, it greeted me with the lovely message "the hard disk's file system is corrupted and will be restored". My hand started shaking. I have many games from the PSN in the HDD, as well as a ton of saves from many games I haven't yet finished properly. I was in the final mission of my last run in Dead Space, in Impossible Difficulty, and to lose that save would really piss me off. The system didn't give me any other options besides "restoring", so I went to Google and searched for this issue.

Many people said that the system formatted all your HDD when that message appeared. I only found two, if I recall correctly, saying that they didn't lose all their data. So, with my heart in my hand, I accepted the restoration. It took about a minute, and then the console rebooted. Thankfully, everything was still there, including the problematic download. I managed to cancel and delete it, and then immediately backed up all of my game saves to my pen drive. I was lucky this download didn't corrupt much in the file system, it was probably just a few blocks.

So I decided to try downloading the same game again. And, with a smile on my face, I saw that when it got at 42% again it stopped the same way, and the system wouldn't turn off once more. So I turned it off manually, turned it on again and there it was again, the message about the file system. This time restoration was even faster and again I didn't lose anything.

So my message is: if you see that notification ("the hard disk's file system is corrupted and will be restored"), don't panic. It doesn't mean you lost everything. Keep your hopes up and let the PS3 do his thing. You may not be that unlucky in the end.

And one more thing: screw that game, I'm not downloading it ever again. Trash Panic, alright. The name suits it.