Playstation 2 Hard Drive Setup

[roberthazelby]

Morning all,

 

For Christmas I received the relevant kit to set up a hard drive inside my ill-used PS2:

 

2TB Seagate Baracuda

Kaico Free McBoot Card

Hard drive adapter to plug drive into PS2

 

I've somehow managed to format the drive, and it's given me 2 x partitions:

 

_mbr

_net

 

I don't think the hard drive size is reading correctly, as it's showing as -189422 MB.

 

 

I've tried creating a +OPL partition by loading up OPL (as looking on forums, this seems to be what you need to do), but no partition is created. If I go into PS2 HDD Manager and try and create a new partition of +OPL, it just says it tells me it's failed.

 

If I go into the hard disk loader and try and install a game it recognises a game and then the system seems to lock up. 

 

 

I'm no doubt doing something daft here, but I'm a bit stumped as to where to go next here.

 

Any help would be appreciated. I thought this would be a fairly simply process of putting my small PS2 library on to hard drive, but it seems not.

 

Many thanks!

 

[erhgiez]

There is no error, it’s the way bytes are shown in decimal (1gb = 1000mb) and binary (1gb = 1024mb).

 

This should clear it up 

 

http://www.endmemo.com/data/diskcapacity.php

 

The OPL loader is notoriously choosey about what cable, interface, HDD brand you use. I used a sata HDD enclosure and there were some axioms I could not perform. To gain full access I would have had to do some specific steps and access it via the ps2 through something similar to ftp but I have forgotten the details. Some digging on the OPL forums should help though

[dumpster]

There are SD card based solutions that might be worth looking into.  I followed a YouTube guide to put a hard drive into the PS2 and I found it really confusing because there have been so many methods over the years. I used WinHiip and it seemed to make a seperate hard drive partition for every game.  Also the install process put a PS1 game on the hard drive as well.  From there I'd connect the hard drive back to the PC and I couldn't find the PS1 or PS2 games anywhere.  It was a really confusing and while it all works I've no idea how the hard drive file structure works.  I reckon if I'd done the SD card method I'd at least know it was an up to date menthod.

[roberthazelby]

With tinkering, I've managed to get a bit further.

 

I found a newer version of BOOT.ELF and copied that to the memory card. Now the hard drive capacity shows correctly in HDD Manager. When formatting the drive it now creates:

 

_mbr

_net

_system

_sysconf

_common

 

The system just locks up when I try and create a +OPL partition. If I go into OPL it just sits there with the spinning icon.

 

Progress, but not there yet.

 

I'll check out the links you guys have kindly suggested.

[roberthazelby]

Ok. A bit more progress. Reformatted the drive and before exiting the HDD Manager I was able to successfully add the +OPL partition.

 

OPL now loads without issue. Yay!

 

HD Loader still refuses to rip my originals to hard drive. I put a disc in, it reads the disc and tells me the size. I select “install” and the machine tells me it’s initialising installation and does nothing else.

 

 This is painful! 

[Sumire]

If you still cannot get it working, I would just rip the games on your PC (if you have a CD burner of course), or download the games you own from the net and do it that way. It will save on CD drive wear anyway. I wanted to FTP to mine, but i had enough of it all by then, so just plugged the drive into my PC and copied the games that way.

The only thing with running games from the HDD unlike the OG Xbox, which I didn't realize at the time, is some games have glitches - there is a list. 

[Camel]

PC is the preferred way if only to save your PS2’s laser. WinHIIP is the tool of choice.

[Ninja Doctor]

23 hours ago, roberthazelby said:

Ok. A bit more progress. Reformatted the drive and before exiting the HDD Manager I was able to successfully add the +OPL partition.

 

OPL now loads without issue. Yay!

 

HD Loader still refuses to rip my originals to hard drive. I put a disc in, it reads the disc and tells me the size. I select “install” and the machine tells me it’s initialising installation and does nothing else.

 

 This is painful! 

So when I last set up a hdd I didn’t do anything to the drive. Just popped it in and used hdloader to do its thing. OPL was perfectly happy with what it had done. I still keep hdloader for ripping my discs directly to the hdd. 
 

maybe take the drive and erase all its partitions the boot straight to hdloader? You are using freemcboot? 

[megamixer]

When I did mine last year, I ripped all of my discs to my PC using IMGBurn then put them onto the HDD using WinHiip.

 

I also had HDLoader to begin with and it is utter ARSE. The amount of times it would crash was unbelievable. It never ripped discs either and it was incredibly slow. Once I switched to OPL and dumping games on via the PC, everything has been well.

 

As has been said, there are games with issues when running from the HDD but this list is very helpful for getting many running:

OPL Compatibility List

 

There are multiple "Modes" that you can toggle on/off and you need to do this with specific games. Outrun 2006 for example wouldn't play any music for example, and would have load issues, until Modes 1, 3, and 6 were all set for this game.

[Vimster]

Will have to check that. Could never get SEGA Rally to boot. 

[ianinthefuture]

Definitely don't use HDLoader, do use OPL. Latter is actually still supported and updated.

 

There's also methods other than winhiip to get games on HDD via PC, much better ones, but annoyingly I can't remind myself what they are right now. I've a batch file you put in the same directory as your Legally Acquired ISOs and it just does it all for you.

 

I found the apps on my laptop - the main one is called HDLBATCH. It basically wangles HDL_DUMP, which can usually only do one disc image-to-hard drive at a time, so that it does as many as you have in the folder with the batch file. I've used it loads, it's very straightforward and good. And it's not Winhiip, which I find fairly hateful at times.

 

Again, this is only for putting disc images from PC onto a PS2 hdd, not for ripping discs.

[chipsgravy]

I recently looked into this and found that apart from free mcboot not much had moved on from when I used to rip my games to a hard drive some 15 odd years ago. WinHiip was still the method of choice and compatability was still spotty. Maybe I need to do some more investigating. As the above looks interesting. 

[Camel]

Spotty is a bit OTT I’d say. There are only a handful of games that won’t run IIRC.

[megamixer]

Gran Turismo 4 is a ballache. I remember having to mess about with some settings to get that working and I can't remember for the life of me what I did, but it wouldn't get past the memory card screen otherwise. One of the regional variants (might be Euro) also doesn't work at all from what I used to read on the forums, or needed a very specific past revision of OPL to run.

 

Seems that, when the new versions of the software get released, problems with games get fixed but new problems with others can arise. If you have a revision that works with everything you have then I wouldn't bother ever updating it.

[Vimster]

The latest version of OPL runs a standard GT4 ISO, at least it does for me.

[ianinthefuture]

Yeah never had any GT4 issues. I think OPL's open source, so problems have been quickly fixed in the past few years. It's extremely rare I have issues running anything on it these days.

 

Not like the old HDLoader days, which were wank.

[Camel]

I still use an HDLoader (or HDAdvance - I forget) disc and the only game I can’t play is Street Fighter Anthology.

[megamixer]

re. GT4, I had to toggle some "Virtual" settings (I really can't remember - it's been a while) to get past the memory card screen on boot-up.

 

There used to be issues with DVD-DL (dual layer) rips as well, with some not being evident until midway through a game before it stopped working (such as God of War 2). As has been said, hopefully these issues have been mostly fixed by now.

[strider]

I have a PS2 with a harddrive and OPL. I've kind of worked out how to add additional games but I can't work out how to add the boxart. One of the things I love ab out stuff on the harddrive is the presentation looks great as you scroll through your stuff. It's less cool when there's a big blank space where the boxart should be. Any idea how to fix it?

[ianinthefuture]

1 hour ago, strider said:

I have a PS2 with a harddrive and OPL. I've kind of worked out how to add additional games but I can't work out how to add the boxart. One of the things I love ab out stuff on the harddrive is the presentation looks great as you scroll through your stuff. It's less cool when there's a big blank space where the boxart should be. Any idea how to fix it?

Connect HDD to PC, use OPL Manager, done.

[strider]

11 minutes ago, ianinthefuture said:

Connect HDD to PC, use OPL Manager, done.

Hmm, I'm sure I've tried that before. I'll give it another try at the weekend.

 

[ianinthefuture]

14 minutes ago, strider said:

Hmm, I'm sure I've tried that before. I'll give it another try at the weekend.

 

I mean you do also have to click the buttons to download the art, so my guide wasn't quite comprehensive.

[roberthazelby]

Thanks for all the help everyone.

 

I think I’m going to have to go down the route of installing a virtual instance of windows on my Mac or Linux Mint machine and copying images over to the PS2 hard drive.

[ianinthefuture]

A new version of OPL has been released that allows use of exFAT formatted HDDs in the PS2, meaning two things - theoretical limits of HDD space bump up to petabytes, and (more interestingly) the ability to just drag and drop ISOs onto the hard drive. No more fannying around with WinHIIP or HDL Batch which I linked previously. Wahey!

 

Github linky.