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I recently acquired a PS3 (120gb Slim CECH-3003A) with some sort of HDD problem.
The console would boot up, complain about having some sort of hard drive error that needs recovery, start recovering, and crash at 48%. But then the original owner decided to remove the hard drive and format it to NTFS. Now the console doesn't even turn on. When the power button is pressed, the light goes green for 2-5 seconds, the just goes off and nothing happens.
How can I fix this?
If you do indeed have the usb-sata cable, plug the hard drive back in, and wipe the drive to remove all partitions, and don't format it afterwards - the PS3 will handle that. Once that's done, plug it back into the PS3 and see if it boots up to a "firmware not found" screen. If so, download the firmware from Sony's Website, copy it to a USB stick, and follow the on-screen prompts to get back in action (this question has that part covered alreay).
If that fails, the hard drive may be faulty - plug it back into the computer, and perform a full format to see if it finds any faulty sectors, or another hard drive testing utility (maybe even H2Testw - will write the whole capacity of the drive, then read it back for errors).
