Swapping Hard Drives Question? - Urgent

so im thinking of getting a new HD for my ps3 but i am having some issues moving files around

Ok, so I have all my family guy and american dad episodes saved on my PS3 and no where else... and my external harddrive is full of movies and other stuff...

so if i buy a hard drive enclousure will i be able to put the old ps3 hard drive in it and hook up it to my pc and save them there?

yes

I am sure that your idea will not work but if you got those from psn then they give you the option of downloading everything you buy up to 5 times. This means that you can put your new hard drive in and download the games again. Unless you have used up all the 5 downloads.

so if i buy a hard drive enclousure will i be able to put the old ps3 hard drive in it and hook up it to my pc and save them there?

MethodManFTW

The internal drive in a PS3 is formatted in a proprietary disc format (that Sony created and owns), so you can't put it into an enclosure and then connect it to another PS3 or PC using a USB cable, the drive will not be accessible. The PS3 can only access external drives when they are formatted in FAT32, and you can't reformat the internal drive to FAT32 without losing all existing data.

The drive will also only work internally with the PS3 that formatted it. So you can't pull the drive out and then install it in another PS3. It will ask you to reformat it when installing it in a new PS3 (so all data would get erased).

You can either choose to redownload the files from the store (up to five times at no additional cost), or you can get an external drive and use the backup feature of the PS3 to copy the internal drive data to the external drive. Then after you install a new drive in the PS3, you can use the backup feature to restore the data from the external drive to the new internal drive.

I took out my 80Gb PS3 hard drive and put it into an enclosure then formatted it and partioned it-roughly 50/50 into 38GBFAT32 to use as a back up drive on my PS3 and the other 38 Gb into NTFS,so i can use this half on my XP pc.

I used a free to download application called swissknife to do this.

It works perfectly-i can save music,pictures etc from my pc,then go straight over and plug the drive into my PS3 USb socket and view the XP/PC files.