All lost like tears in rain. My 300gb hdd was full and I wanted to clone it to a 1TB hdd but unlike the third party software instruction turned out it was impossible because PC can't see PS3 data. I put the old hdd back in PS3 and nothing happened. I went to recovery screen but couldn't restore anything. I had plans for trophy hunting, at least a few platinums, now I can forget about that =( It would be a colossal waste of time to replay my games back to the old state.

Man, that sucks butt :(

Sorry for your loss. I don't mean to sound like d-bag but re-playing games that you enjoyed isn't a waste of time if you can have a good time again. Obviously you can't do it all at once, but consider replaying them one by one in the future.

My deepest condolences man. :(

i did work with data bases in a previous job and i did also learn the importance of backups the hard way. when my ps3 YOLD i did have the luck that a reflow did bring her to life long enough to perform a backup...

your clone software should do the cloning even if it doesn't recognize the data...

Thank you brothers and sisters. Yes it is my own fault, I should have made a backup before doing anything else, I didn't and paid dearly. I don't have PS+... But on positive side it's a new beginning - I will have more motivation to play new games instead of chasing worthless trophies in the old ones.

Can't you back up your old hard drive on the ps3 to an external drive then install the new hard drive and restore the backup to the new drive? Same process as ps4. Don't need a PC for this.

T____T

Yes I should have done that instead of trying to clone, but now it's too late, all is lost.

Well, everybody has already chimed in about what you should have done......so I will too. What were you thinking!!!??? Anyways, I'm sorry you lost all that time and effort dude. That truly sucks. :( I still don't understand how the data was lost though. Did your hd simply stop working due to wear and tear, or was there a technical reason?