if your laptop crashed are you sure your hard drive is ok, not faulty in any way

Best idea would be to shoot over to the Playstation 3 official forums and get the info straight from the horses mouth.  I know someone that's thrown a 250gb hard drive into the PS3 and I'll probably throw a 320gb HDD in mine in a few months.  The instructions on how to put a new hard drive into the PS3 are in the manual you get with it though there are some handy videos and such around if you google it.  First i'd go over to the ps3 forums though.

hopefully this helps, it's from the PS blog

FYI

I was told over the phone with Sony that upgrading your hard drive does not void you warranty.

As long as it's a 2.5" SATA drive under 250GB it will work. I bought one off newegg last week and I should be installing it next week. There are numerous tutorials on the web, the one Munkeh posted is a good example.

If this harddrive is an S-ATA drive and formated in FAT32 ,then there is no problem - it mostlikely is formated in NTFS , if vista was preinstalled on your notebook , so you might have to re-format it before installing the hdd.

 I heard people installing 500gig hdd?  Is that possible, Cause that is what I'm hoping to do in a few years :D

I'm not 100% sure if 250GB is the limit I just remember tutorials advising not going over 250GB, but they did not state why. I don't see why there would have to be a limit though.

 The PS3 will reformat the internal drive.  FAT32 is for USB external drives.

 I have a 3.5"/7200RPM/16MB cache/200GB drive on mine but I bought the SATA Port extender and ran a cable from my PS3 to my external hard drive case.  Either way, the Playstation will wipe the drive you put in there and install the needed format and files to get it running.

 It says how to upgrade it in the manual as well.