[Cbe-oss-dev] PS3 OtherOS gone

[Jim Paris]

Hubertus A. Haniel wrote:
> 
> I have tried plugging in a USB hard disk but the backup option keeps
> prompting me to plug a device in to the save destination so I can
> not figure out where I can set the save destination - I also have
> read that the backup may not actually back up everything and when
> you restore it only restores the same partition size as people have
> been trying to use that method for swapping drives. - I am
> considering if I should take the drive out and plug it into another
> linux system and then dd the whole lot just in case Sony reinstate
> the OtherOS option and after I have a full backup trying if I can
> get anywhere with something like partition magic. Anybody tried this
> before and was successful using Partition Magic?

Partition Magic won't work, because the partition table is encrypted
and is a PS3-proprietary format.  There's no easy way to resize the
PS3 filesystem without reformatting.

The Linux section of the disk is not encrypted, so yes, you can
extract it for backup with dd.  If you chose "allocate 10GB for
otherOS", then the Linux data should be the last 0x13ffff8 sectors
of the disk.

-jim