Playstation 2 HDD Guide 

 

           So you want to put a hard drive in your Playstation 2.  Well, the first thing you need to do is gather the necessary hardware.  The first component needed is a Playstation 2, and it must be one of the older fat models, slims won't work.  Next, no mattter what you plan on using your hard drive for, you will need an official Sony Network Adapter to connect it to your playstation.  Finally, you need a hard drive.  Physical installation of the hard disk drive is simple and involves 1) first attaching the hard drive to the network adapter by simply lining up the connectors and plugging them together  2) taking off the plastic piece on the back of the Playstation labled "Expansion bay" and sliding the hard drive and network adapter into the bay and then 3) screwing the network adapter's screws so as to hold it in the drive bay.  Be careful when screwing the screws and just use a dime instead of a screwdriver because they don't need to be too tight and you will strip them.  The type of hard drive you need will differ depending on what you want to do with the hard drive.  If you plan on using the hard drive to play Final Fantasy online, or for use with any of the 8 other officially licensed games that support the HDD, then you need to obtain an Official Sony 40GB HDD and the utility disk which comes with it to install and configure your drive.  The official drive can be used with 9 games to reduce load times and can also be used with select other games to as a save device instead of a memory card.  However, if you are looking to boot games from your HDD then you can use almost any standard IDE Hard Drive up to 2 TB, but you should check the hard drive compatibility chart first to make sure it will work.  To boot games, some type of third party software is needed such as HD Advance.  Hd Advance used to be available for purchase from the company which created it, but they were forced to stop producing it by Sony.  There are still sites which sell HD Advance today but I cannot recommend any.  The best thing to do at this point is to obtain some way to boot homebrew software.  If you have a way of booting up burned discs, like swap magic/ flip top or a modchip, then you can search for HD Advance and find an image of it to burn, easy as that.  But it you can't boot homebrew,    the easiest way to do it is to take advantage of the Playstation 2 memory card exploit.  This will require a memory card and a original Playstation 1 game, and some way of transeferring files from your computer to your memory card, such as Action Replay.  What it involves, essentially, is putting a file on your memory card which tricks the Playstation into thinking that it should load that application from the memory card whenever a certain PS1 game is inserted with the card.  PS1 games have a certain line of code that can be extracted and put on a memory card and used to make the PS2 boot homebrew software off of the memory card.  There is also a file which can easily be searched for that contains the code to many PS1 games so you don't have to mess with that which is the hardest part.  Now that you have exploited your PS2 to run homebrew software, you need to find a program launcher like Keylauch.  This is the file which will let you launch your various programs, such as HD Advance.  To get HD Advance, you must find the specific .elf file of it, and assign it to open with a certain button on your keylauncher.  Or, there may also be a file which can be found which contains a keylauncher already enabled with the latest version of HD Advance and it just needs to be downloaded and but on the memory card.  Just search the key words I have provided and you will find what files you need to get HD Advance up and running.  The first time you run HD Advance, your hard drive must be formatted and the time this will take varies depending on whether or not the hard drive is empty and possibly how large it is.  After it is formatted, games can be installed, ran, and deleted easily and with the latest version, .08b, most games work.  Many of the games that don't work have patches available, but patching a .elf file will require more research as I will not go that far in this guide.  Questions or comments about the guide or HDD in general can be directed to video.game.newz@gmail.com