My sisters PS3 today was not playing discs in it. She called me asked what should she do about it so I told her I'd be over in a bit and take a look at it.  Well in the meantime she got on the internet and somebody told her to restore her PS3 -_-  She did and lost all of her data.  Does anybody know if I can get her data back? Or is it gone forever?  Also her PS3 is still broke so the person who told her that......Anyways I kind of figure that there is no hope with the memory but I was curious.

not that I know off...

Wait, does it work now, just isn't playing discs?

the data is gone for good

as for the PS3, well obviously it looks like the Br drive is broken or (if you are lucky) the laser lens is just dirty

try to play BR movies/DVD movies and games from the hdd (which should work) to confirm that suspicion

try to clean the laser lens and if that doesn't improve the situation you probably have to look on ebay for a PS3 BR drive for that particular PS3 model (there should be several listings for that)

my memory came back, but i fear she'll need a new disk drive, just like me.

what is the nature of it not playing? cause you may just need to clean it out, but the risk in doing that is the problem i ended up with.

button got put in upside down, took it apart again to fix it, re dusted the system again, and the disk drive wouldn't work.

Well we got it working so I have a feeling it just needs to be cleaned out.  She has two cats and a dog so I can only imagine.   The only reason she is upset about the memory is because she had all of her videos that she recorded on there and for whatever reason she didnt have a backup.  I've recovered data on computers before with software so I didnt know if i could do something like that with the PS3 hard drive or not.  It's been a long time since ive done something like that anyways and Im thinking that hard drive was corrupted not wiped

Thanks for everybody helping by the way.  i really appreciate it

Out of interest what model PS3 was it?

It was the PS3 Slim.  She has two. The fat model and the slim.  The slim was the one that was messed up.

Fuck. It's gone bro. I did that shit when I had no idea what I was doing on the PS3 and it deleted all my stuff. It's a pain in the ass.