No end in sight for PS3-bricking update glitch
There’s an old Chinese proverb: “If update is new, wait a day or two.” Many PS3 owners who failed to heed the proverb’s wisdom found themselves with bricked consoles Monday night due to a faulty system update. Nearly 48 hours later, Sony is yet to issue a fix. Read on for the details.
The update in question, firmware version 4.45, was released late Monday evening, and it didn’t take long for the problems to start. A thread on the official PlayStation forums began to fill with angry customers, claiming that after installing the update and rebooting, their PS3 consoles were now stuck on the “ribbon” startup screen. The following morning, a Sony representative posted another thread in the same forum, announcing that the 4.45 update had been disabled, and that an investigation into the cause of the errors was underway.
A day later, the same Sony rep updated the thread… to say that there was no new information.
As internet communities tend to do, those affected by the update error have begun to speculate. Numerous theories have sprung up to diagnose the problem, the most popular being that only larger (or replacement) hard drives are affected. Of course, this is likely due to the fact that relatively few people are still using the smaller HDDs that came with the original PS3. Some desperate individuals have attempted to reformat the drives themselves, and you can probably guess how successful those efforts were.
For now, those with bricked consoles can only wait and hope that their precious saved game data isn’t lost forever. See, people in my life who shall remain nameless who makes fun of me for turning off automatic updates on everything? This is why!
