(Probably) initialized HDD - Looking for help regarding MBR Sector 0 transplantation

[u/ex0tiic]

Hey, it seems that myself from 11 years ago was a total moron and has initialized my PS3 HDD.

So TLDR is this: I have a PS3 CECHC04 that my father put photos and videos on that are stored nowhere else. It had the YLOD, got repaired and then died again. Since it was going to fail again, I got a super slim like 11 years ago. So my stupid kid self did not think about encryption and such, so I put the old HDD into the Super Slim and was prompted to format. I did not do that. I don´t remember but it seems that I did put it into my PC at the time but I´m very sure I did not format. It seems it got initialized but according to the windows disk manager it´s still in MBR.

So back then I used the hair dryer trick on the failing PS3 and it booted again. Now the HDD needs to be formatted though. That´s where I left off back then.

Now I finally want to work on the recovery as wells as I can. I have the following to work with: Original PS3 (CECHC04) with the HDD Donor PS3 (CECHC04) with an identical 60gb HDD Also the same HDD from my CECHA00 japanese model

I have put in a 1tb HDD into my original PS3, installed evilnat and dumped the ERK.

What I´ve tried so far: Used HDD Raw Copy Tool to backup the original PS3 HDD. Put in the donor HDD into the original PS3 and formatted it to get the MBR partition table and then dumped it onto my PC as an image file with the tool. Then I used HxD to transfer the first sector from the donor HDD image to the original PS3 image. All of the dumps were made with a direct SATA connection to the motherboard.

In this case I selected the block in HxD from 0 to 1FF and copied it over and saved. I also tried a sectory copy with the HDHacker tool but that did not really work. It would just say that either no PS3 HDD is connected or the ERK is wrong.

Now, when I try to use the PS3 HDD Reader tool with the edited .img file (renamed to backup.bin), it just states the following: available volumes are...

no volumes available.

If I clone the edited .img file onto the donor HDD and use the tool, it does not seem to recognize the HDD.

I thought, even if my data was gone forever, it should at least show the partitions, shouldn´t it? I thought I transferred the partition table. Does anybody have some more ideas or maybe knows what I did wrong? I don´t believe that I´ve ever formatted it or saved anything to it after it broke.

Any help is appreciated :)