Somebody please explain to me how a software update can brick consoles? You should be able to manually remove the update but apparently you can't even reformat to fix it. How's that possible? I've never in my life heard of software breaking hardware. It's unfathomable. GG Sony.
Kinda reminds me of how crappy their software is on my Sony Bravia TV. It loads as slow as the XMB on PSN and sometimes will even crash. Worst. Software. Programmers. Ever.
Im guessing if people are trying to do HDD rebuild and reach 38% then it says unable to rebuild. Must format.. Ive seen that happen once before (without an update). I was playing Fifa 12 on and older fat PS3 80GB (I upgraded to 500gb Seagate Momentus), the game froze my ps3, I was unable to switch it off with the on/off button. I was forced to use the switch on the back of the PS3.
When I booted it up again, I had very very similar problems to what people are having here.
I did research and it turned out that the partition was in fact being corrupted by me switching it off.
Anyways, the symptoms are oddly similar.
Black screen on bootup.
Stuck at the wavy lines before the XMB.
HDD rebuild failing at 38%.
I did read online at the time if that happend, you should try to remove the HDD, connect it to your PC and run Seagate Tools. Scan for errors and fix it. Im not quite sure how it even ends up with corrupted partitions if its FAT32.