PS3 Media Servers

If you are like me You have more movies than the PS3 will hold on the internal hard drive. Replacing the drive on the PS3 is expensive and voids your warranty. Most of you already have a external USB hard drive.  Here is how to take a USB external hard drive and make it work with the PS3.

On Linux, find out what drives you have and identify your USB drive.

fdisk -l

Note what drive it is /dev/sd(a,b,c,d, or any other letter). We will just use sde for this demo.

Here is the answer. Type the following:

fdisk /dev/sde
Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/sde: 128 MB, 128974848 bytes
4 heads, 62 sectors/track, 1015 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 248 * 512 = 126976 bytes

Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System

Command: n “Create new partition!”
p “Create primary partition!”
Partition number (1-4): 1
First cylinder: (enter for default)
Last cylinder:  (enter for default)
Command: t
Hex code (type L to list codes): b
Command: a “Make partition #1 active!”
Partition number (1-4): 1
Command: p

Disk /dev/sde: 128 MB, 128974848 bytes
4 heads, 62 sectors/track, 1015 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 248 * 512 = 126976 bytes

Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sde1   *           1        1015      125829    b  FAT32

Command: w “Write table to disk and exit!”

Format the USB drive with a FAT filesystem.

mkdosfs -F 32 /dev/sde1 “It will work with FAT32?

Now unplug the drive and plug it back in, Linux should mount it.

On Windows,

Go to ‘run’ from the start button and type ‘cmd’ to bring up the
command window.
Type this in the command line:
format /FS:FAT32 X:
(Where X is the drive letter)

Here is the part you do on Linux or Windows so the PS3 will see it as a drive it can use. In the root of the Dirve make 4 Directories all in CAPS:

MUSIC

VIDEO

PHOTO

GAME

Now load up all your data and have fun. One word of waring. The FAT32 file system does not support files larger than 3.9gig. So those big HD movies may Fail when you try to copy them over.