Data Recovery on PS3 HDD

Hi! I accidentally Converted a MBR disk (PS3 HDD) to GPT. From what I understand, the PS3 “fat” only accepts FAT32 and MBR disks. I need the original disk for the PS3 to correctly reset the encryption because I heard that it uses it for encryption.
What I want to do:

  1. Clone HDD(70GB) from PS3 to a SSD(120GB) (exactly, partitions and all, because data is not visible in Windows)
  2. Format HDD from PS3, and “reset” using ps3 update by usb.
  3. Copy the first sectors of the formated drive.
  4. Insert the copied sectors into The SSD.

Does anyone know of any tools that can clone the drive and then copy the first sectors of MBR from the old disk to the SSD after i format it? (Leaving the other data)
How do I check that my cloned drive is exactly the same as the old one? (PS3 disk shows up as empty in disk manager) Someone on a youtube video or something mentioned something about HEX editor?
Preferably not using linux, since I’m not really comfortable in bash or such.

That would be nice to know too, but I just replaced my PS3 HDD and used the Playstation guide on Sony’s website as I didn’t have any data to recover from.

R-Studio

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Buy used PS3 from gamestop, get data needed return PS3?

Doesn’t work. PS3 HDDs are tied to the encryption key generated each time the CMOS/Factory Reset occurs.

There’s a huge deal about this calling it the C-Bomb.

PS3s also have a VERY NASTY hardware encryption for changing out Blu-ray drive components. Drives must be paired to the correct hardware or you will have a bricked drive.

PS3s as well? I thought it was ps4/ps5 only, and that the PS4 has already been fixed.

Yup, if you factory reset a PS3, all data is lost if you re-plug in the same drive, even if it was not present for the reset.

Only way is to do the official backup utility over USB, so if you had a component failure that forced you to factory reset, you cannot recover data as the paired encryption key has changed for the filesystem.

I happen to have the keys…for my console

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