PSN Trophy/HDD Question

[stpatty]

I've run into a bit of a problem with my PS3 (which I believe is GT5's fault but we'll get to that later) and I have to restore the HDD. The HDD is a new (well, not the one the PS3 came with) 500GB bought specifically for GT5, and was installed in mid November '10.

The PS3 started going funny on Wednesday, I was doing a remote race and it started sticking, so I quit the race and turned the PS3 off. I left it a bit, turned it back on again and it was stuck on the opening screen. Turned it off and on again and I got to the XMB, but it was really slow and jerky so I put it off again and left it for the night.

Since then I've tried to make it work, but I've been stuck in a loop of "The hard disk's file system is corrupt and will be restored" > do this > repeat message.

I looked up for solutions to fix the problem and I tried the restore file system thingy from safe mode, it never worked. I've accepted now that I'll have to do the full HDD restore which will cause me to lose all my data, my saves, my installs, my photos (although it was only GT5 photos which are all on my computer anyway bar about 4 new ones), my trophy collection, everything.

I still have my back-up from my HDD switch 5 months ago so my questions are thus:

1. Will this HDD restore work? Will it return me to a functional yet blank hard drive?
2. What will happen to my trophy collection? My trophy collection that's stored on the PS3 will be different from my online one (since I've synced the trophies I'd won in the last 5 months) and will the two of them be merged when I sign in using my PSN account if the transfer goes ahead?

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Any help is greatly appreciated. This is also a lesson to everyone to back-up their data. Fortunately I did that with the copiable game saves I have a few weeks ago, I think the only stuff I'm losing that I'd made progress in is the Sly Collection and NFS:Shift so I wont be too badly affected but I'd hate for this to happen to someone and have them lose all their data.

 

[Han_the_Dragon]

Well that backup you did, should still work, so ya, you will end up with everything you had when you did the backup, if that doesn't work then the problem may be the HDD.

As for trophies, the server can't delete trophies, only add, so what will happen is that when you sync the trophies the PS3 will download the info off all trophies (even the ones you didn't had at the time of the backup), and update the list. It may take a bit more time then a normal sync and there's 1 other thing, when you start any game the PS3 will automatically put the trophies for that game at 0%, after that I would suggest you to do a sync to actualize them, otherwise when you do anything that would trigger a trophy, the PS3 will start saying you got all the trophies in a row, still it doesn't affect the time stamp in the trophies, since the time stamp saved in the PSN is the one it will keep, after a sync, this was really funny when I changed my HDD, since the 1st time I say this was with a game I had Platinum (and the trophies pop up is in a random sequence...)

 

[stpatty]

Yeah they started to sync when I did it the first time. After that I tried to restore the old backup I had... it's ruined it. The PS3 takes ages to turn on/off and is really slow. It doesn't read discs now either... I'm going to do a full format (estimated time: 28 hours 46 minutes tomorrow) in the hope that works.