If you have an after market hard disk drive 500GB – 1TB chances are your PS3 was bricked by the latest update. You can fix it yourself in 3 easy steps.

  1. Power OFF the PS3
  2. Press and HOLD the power key until the system power cycles three times
  3. Re-update your firmware.

Why does this work? The 1st boot is normal. The 2nd boot is video reset mode. The 3rd boot is safe mode, bypassing the broken firmware.

Estimated percentages of system affected:

Aftermaket HDDs, 500GB-1TB ~90%
Stock 500GB models ~8%
Stock 120GB models ~2%
Stock 1st-gen fat models ~ 0%

An alternate way to boot the bricked system is to replace the aftermarket drive with the stock drive. Boot, re-update, replace after market drive.