PS3 Hard Drive Swap

I was fortunate enough to receive a new hard drive for my PS3 this christmas and thought it would be a piece of cake. Enough blogs gave me that impression, but few mentioned how difficult the process of backing up the data on your PS3 could be. Here, let me draw up the scenario; I have a 300 GB NTFS external hard drive, should be suitable for backing up a 60 GB PS3, right? Wrong... For some reason the PS3 OS will only recognize external devices formated in the FAT32 format, not NTFS. Oh wait, that is not the only catch, the kicker is Microsofts operating system limits the size of a volume which could be formatted in FAT32 (32 GB). So I had a bit of a dilemma, since my hard drive had about 55 GB of data on it. I tried a couple 3rd party applications, but since they were not Windows 7 compatible and I could not get anything to trick windows into formatting over 60 GB. Rather than suffer any longer by continuing to search the internet for another couple of hours, I broke down and deleted enough off the drive to be able to backup at least 30 GB. From here on out it was really a piece of cake. Step by step:

1. 
   
   Plug in your external Hard Drive, and turn on the PS3
   
   
   
2. 
   
   In the XMB find Settings > System Settings > Backup Utility and run that guy
   
3. Once the back up is complete, power down everything and pull your PS3 out
   
4. Lay the PS3 down Horizontally and remove the small panel from the bottom of the PS3
   
5. There you will see the Hard Drive cage behind the blue screw.
   
6. Unscrew, flip handle and slide right. Now pull out the Hard Drive
   
7. Its a standard SATA laptop Hard Drive mounted in a cage by four screws.
   
8. Remove the four screws CAREFULLY! You can really strip these bad without a small tipped phillips...
   
9. Mount in the new Hard Drive to the cage, push down and slide left. You should feel a click.
   
10. Replace blue screw, cover and reconnect your PS3 to the entertainment center
    
11. The PS3 will need to format the new drive.
    
12. Once that is complete, reconnect the external Hard Drive, In the XMB find Settings > System Settings > Backup Utility and Restore Backup
    
13. Enjoy your beefed up PS3