#but then it turns out you can't boot from that drive if it IS formatted that way

[love-fireflysong]

Okay! Final update (I swear lol) for those who are worried about/invested in my ps4 hard drive issues!

Long story short: my save data is completely unrecoverable. It's gone. I'm completely shit out of luck for recovering pretty much anything on that drive and I have no one to blame but myself.

Learn from my mistakes and take note of these two very important tips I'm about to impart on you.

If you have a ps+ substriction and you turn off the auto upload to the cloud to platinum a game in one playthrough instead of like 3 (like i did) than for the love of all that is holy turn that shit back on the second you finish. I did not do that so all my save data since I finished vampyr a year ago is kaput cause none of that uploaded.

If you start to notice that your ps4 is starting to lag a little bit when on the hud screen or when a game is booting, then that means that hard drive failure is on the horizon and back up your save data ASAP onto a USB drive. My ps4 had been letting me know for weeks now that it was about to bsod me but hindsight is 20/20 as they say 😔

(For those that want to know exactly why all my data is unrecoverable, then all the in depth techy talk about my discoveries over the past couple of days are below the cut)

So first things first: any site or article that promises a way to recover data from a ps4 hard drive is lying through their fucking teeth. Maybe the methods work on an external ps4 hard drive I don't know, but an internal hard drive is GONE baby! Due to the fact that a pc and ps4 format each of their hard drives in completely different ways, neither is readable on the other without reformatting said drive to work. Which *will* completely erase everything that once existed and leave it empty and ready for use. (Which I already knew about going in so I never did that but I figured I would mention just in case someone tries it for themselves)

That being said, lots of programs will scan your hard drive for free and it *is* possible to scan an internal ps4 hdd. It will just appear hidden as a 'lost partition' and unavailable to pick through the files because, once again, the formatting is not native to pcs. BUT, every scan I tried was only able to find *maybe* about 2gb worth of what I knew was a nearly full 500gb hdd.

And while scanning is free, recovering the said files are not. Every program will cost pretty much $100 usd for a months subscription.

And in a test of putting the old hdd into the external hard drive and hooking it up to the ps4 and seeing if i could access my data that way, the answer was also a big fat no. While I did find out that I *could* still use the hard drive as an external if I wanted hilariously enough, it would require me to, once again, reformat the thing so it would work. Also, turns out anyways that a ps4 external hdd only saves the game applications and thats it. No pictures, videos, or save game data: that is all saved to the interior hdd so that method of backing up is a no go sorry to say.

I admittedly have one last method to try, but I don't have high hopes for it though lol. When I next get paid and have money again, I'm gonna call the actual game console repair store that is located in the northern part of my city and see if they can do anything, but I doubt it. Even if they can though, if I'm correct that method will probably cost me like $400 cad to transfer the data to a new hdd that's already formatted to my ps4. Cause it turns out that you can't move hard drives from one console to another, each one is uniquely formatted so putting mine into my roomies would require reformatting the thing so it can be read and used on hers.

But it's my last shot, I just don't have high hopes of it working 😒

[laikaflash]

Sometimes I miss TV Tropes' high octane nightmare fuel pages. The "Other" subpage also contained such gems as an entry that simply read "WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS" with a YouTube link long since lost to time.

Transcript below the cut.

Three words: "Cannot Load OS".

For those who don't know why that's High Octane Nightmare Fuel, consider this: Your computer, which you've had since high school, has a lot of stuff on it. Irreplaceable stuff. Fanfics, music, pictures of you and your friends, etc. One morning, on a whim, you decide to run a program called Restoration, which allows you to permanently delete files from the hard drive that have already been deleted. You've used this program before, and it's never had any problems. On this particular day, you let it run from around 7:00 AM to 8:00 PM. Some time in the afternoon, the scrollbar and all the icons vanish from the desktop, but you don't think it's a big deal. Around 8 PM, Restoration finishes, and you go to close the program, but the desktop is empty. No icons, no scrollbar...ABSOLUTELY NOTHING except for the wallpaper. You hit Ctrl-Alt-Del a few times...and then the wallpaper is distorted and squashed. You restart the computer, expecting to see the usual boot-up sequences...and instead, you get "ERROR: Cannot Load OS". You restart it again. "Error: Cannot Load OS." You restart it again. ERROR: Cannot Load OS." Panic begins to set in. You turn off the computer, wait a minute and then turn it on again. ERROR: Cannot Load OS. You try this a few more times, becoming more and more fearful that the hard drive has been formatted each time. After a phone call to the nearest computer repair shop and a trip that seems to take a day when it's really just 20 minutes, you find out that the File Allocation Table has been either moved or altered, meaning that the files are still on the computer, but the computer can't find them. Because your computer is running Windows 98—-and therefore using the obsolute FAT 32 allocation system—-there's no guarantee that you can get the data back from the hard drive, or if the problem can even be fixed...... That happened to me this past July. I have yet to find out if all of the hard drive can be saved or not.

[vaiyamagic]

After a long, incredibly irritating series of events, I finally have a computer that can run modern games again. Hooray!