Help! I think my PS3 is dying.

Its really weird and it just started happening out of the blue. My PS3 wont read any Bluray discs and whenever I try to restart it, it restarts and says 'Rebuilding database', then sometimes it goes to the XMB menu, but most of the time it says Rebuilding failed and tells me my harddrive must be formatted. When I select NO to formatting, it tells me that the harddrive inside is "incorrect" and doesnt proceed to the XMB menu.

When there is no disc in the Bluray drive, it does go to the menu(sometimes) but still wont load any demos or games that I put in. I still get the Playstation 3 logo in the beginning but after that it goes blank. My vids and the Internet Explorer work however. I seriously dont want to reformat my drive as I have 50 gigs of vids stored that I do not want to lose. especially my Arrested Development seasons.

Has anyone had this problem? would formatting the hd actually fix my PS3?

Get an external HDD, Take a backup of what ever you want and then format the internal HDD.handag

exactly. if you have a laptop, just pick up a double ended usb cable and use that as an external hd.

thanks for the replies guys.

i guess i should just reformat it and back up my data using SD cards. it will take a while but oh well.

That actually happened to my ps3 once after i dled a COD4 patch. My friends list and data were all supposedly lost but once i reformatted it, everything worked normally. But i guess to be on the safe side, backup your data.tmntPunchout

yeah, i am backing my data right now. one quick question though, doesn't all the data on a drive get deleted once its reformatted?

again, thanks for all your help people! now lets rejoice the Bluray finally winning the format war! :D