Kenja, on 09 November 2010 - 10:09 AM, said:
Yep I tried everything. My friend had an external port and it wouldn't read the HDD at all. So we took it one step further and took the HDD out of my roomate's PS3 and put mine in. Not only did it not read it but it wanted to reformat the drive. Believe me I wanted to do everything to save that drive because I had a lot of time heavy games saved on that damn drive (Demon Souls, GTA, Dead Space, SC4, MW2, Valkyria Chronicles, etc). Lesson learned, I now have a 1TB external HDD that I save all of my data to.
When you put in a different HDD from the original one, the PS3 is going to catch that and ask you to reformat.
I imaged my data from my 80gb HDD to a 500gb one, and it didn't ask me to reformat when I put in the new HDD, was like nothing ever happened.