PS2 Hard Drive Upgrade Guide - FAST & EASY Setup!

in this video i'm going to show you everything that you need to do to install an internal hard drive into your fat model playstation 2 and start playing your games right off your internal hard drive and it all starts right now hi blaine locklear here to level up your video game hardware and software through restorations repairs mods product reviews and other video game content do that by subscribing let's get your playstation 2 fat model set up with an internal hard drive as great as it would be to grab any old hard drive out of your storage drawer and throw it in your playstation 2. the playstation 2 is as my father would have said kind of fickle it only works with specific makes and models of sata based hard drives and the playstation 2 hard drive compatibility chart is where you want to look to find out which ones work and which ones don't one of my favorites on the list is the western digital wd 10 ez ex it's a one terabyte hard drive three and a half inch so it fits the playstation 2 correctly 7200 rpm and as the guide lists right here it works with the standard sat at a ps2 adapter works great and has plenty of space for your games and at forty dollars us it's cheaper than it's ever been i've got this link for you in the description below if you need one for your playstation 2. you need a way to connect that drive to your pc in order to transfer files and games over to it i've been using this usb 3.0 to sata dock for about a year and a half now and it's been completely reliable and fantastic i've got it linked for you in the description if you need one you have to have a way to connect your hard drive to your playstation 2 and it's one of these sata to ps2 adapters i've been using this one for about a year now and it's been completely reliable i have it linked for you in the description if you need one you'll need a free mcboot card for your playstation 2 to get this set up if you need one i've got this one linked for you in the description below and if you want to transfer art and cover files for your games over to your playstation 2 you'll need a usb drive formatted in fat32 format and this one is linked in the description if you need one there are two key downloads you'll need to get in order to make this work the first one is called windhip winhip is used to format the hard drive for your playstation 2 and to transfer your games over to it i've got it linked for you in the description below download it from the ps2 home site here and you'll also need the open ps2 loader or opl manager software i've got this link for you in the description grab the download from this website right here in your downloads folder you should have windhip.rar and you should have opl manager as zip windhip's an rar file and you'll need software to extract that but i have it in the description if you need it go ahead and extract the rar file and then delete that rar file once it's completed in order to eliminate confusion and clutter then with opl that one's a standard zip file and you can just extract that with the regular windows extraction software and once it's done delete the zip file in order to eliminate clutter and confusion go ahead and connect your saddle hard drive to your computer either by using that sata dock i showed you earlier or by ribbon connecting it to your computer then go into the windhip folder go to the windhip executable and you have to run it as administrator if you don't run it as administer it will not work correctly and then when prompted select yes at the splash screen greeting menu just come down to the ok button and click it this is the win hit main interface in order to get your hard drive formatted for use on a playstation 2 come up to select drive and click on it in this case i'm using a 500 gigabyte hard drive that's not configured yet so i can show you the entire process you'll get an error message that it's not formatted for playstation 2 yet we know that click on ok to move forward once you've selected the drive that you intend to use go up to the options button and then click on it there's one setting in here that you need to pay special attention to and that is if your drive is larger than 128 gigabytes to check 48 bit hd loader then click on ok now you're ready to format the drive come down to the format button and click on it from here there's one more setting that you want to check and that's to make sure that 48 bit hd loader is picked if you picked 48-bit hd loader which you probably did once you've confirmed that you can come down to ok and click on it and you'll get several warnings that you're getting ready to format your drive and that is irreversible click on yes then when you're really really sure you want to format click on ok the format process usually takes several minutes in real time depending upon the size and speed of your drive once the process is complete and if everything went to plan you'll get a confirmation message that your drive has been formatted and ready to go come down and click on ok to continue and you'll get a splash screen that says that you'll probably get a software license agreement on the playstation 2 when you run it for the first time with the new hard drive installed just click ok to continue through it before you can start shuffling things around onto the playstation 2 drive you just formatted opl needs to set up a folder structure first on the hard drive here's what you do close out when hip then go to your desktop now on your desktop or wherever you want on your computer really you'll need to create a new folder in that new folder you want to name it opl what you'll do at this point is actually launch opl for the first time so it can create a folder structure here's how it's done go back to the file explorer where you have your downloads and go back one level that's going to be where you have the winhip and opl folders but this time go into the opl folder opl has its own executable file select the executable file and launch it i'd recommend running it as administrator as well and then when prompted select yes if you're getting value from this video make sure you subscribe while you're here we have an incredible group of gamers here and you belong here with us all right let's get back to it when you launch opl for the first time it's going to tell you that there are no folders available we're going to correct that right now click on ok and then click on no so you don't write folders to some place that doesn't exist it should pop up automatically but if it doesn't go up to settings and then click on change mode opl folder you'll get a pop-up window that will allow you to establish where your opl folder is located we put it right on the desktop so it's super easy barely an inconvenience click on browse and you'll get the standard pop-up window that lets you pick locations in windows you can just scroll down to the bottom of this and you'll find the opl folder right there click on it and then click on ok then come over to the left and click on the save button to save that path setting change alright now that the path is set you can create the folders necessary for opl come over to the ok button and click on it and at the pop-up message this time click on yes it's going to create folders inside the opl folder that you put on the desktop you're going to need these folders in just a moment that's everything that you need to do with opl at the moment you can go ahead and close out opl and go back to your windows desktop let's just take a moment and make sure that opl did its job go ahead and minimize file explorer for the moment and go over to your opl folder you created and click into it you should see a new series of folders here the one that you're going to copy your game isos over to is called dvd let's go ahead and do that now i keep some isos on this computer just for doing demonstrations and for example this one has tekken 4 dot iso available for it right click on your iso that you want to transfer into this folder and copy it once you have the iso or iso game files copied navigate back to the opl folder and then into the dvd folder and then paste them in the dvd folder adding art to the games is optional but it does add value to the process once you get everything set up and going if you want to add art go back to the downloads folder or wherever you downloaded and copied over opl and go back into opl folder and once again locate the opl exe file and then right click and run it as administrator and when prompted by windows come down and select yes you're almost certain to get a pop-up message that says that you have bad iso names and it's going to show you the bad iso tab this is because looking up artwork in the database requires that the game to be named in a very specific format let's go ahead and correct that move your pointer over to the ok button and click on it opl makes it possible to get the proper database names for these games online to get the database name for a game click on the game to highlight it then navigate to the pane on the right side and click try update file name this will access opl's online database to try to get you the proper database name for your game and in this case it did to change the game name click on yes now opo can download or what's called scrape the art for your game go up to batch and click on it and then come down to arc download and click you're not going to see any arc files here yet because they haven't been downloaded yet let me show you how that's done in the paint on the right check the boxes for any artwork that you're interested in downloading for the games that you have installed in this example i checked them all so we can get everything then click on the start button to let it rip once the process is completed you'll get a pop-up message that the operation was successful and you'll see the artwork for the game that you downloaded you can also do this process in batch so that you don't have to go back and do each game one at a time click ok to close the pop-up message and you're done with opl you can click the right x button in the top right corner and close out opl to go back to your desktop if you haven't yet go ahead and put that fat32 formatted usb drive into your computer because you're going to need it for copying art go into the opl folder and you'll see an art folder here which is now populated with the art that you downloaded all of the art files get thrown into this one folder so if you have multiple games you'll have multiple games worth of art in the same folder you'll need to grab this folder so right click it and pick copy then you'll need to navigate to this pc and go to the usb drive that you've plugged in in this case it's drive f double click into the drive and then paste the art folder right on the root of the drive okay the art's ready to go let's go ahead and copy those iso files that you put in the opl folder on your desktop over to your playstation 2 hard drive go back to your downloads folder or wherever you copied windhip and go back into the windhip folder then find winhip and remember you have to launch this one as administrator so right click and pick run as administrator and at the prompt select yes remember that winhip needs to know which drive to copy files over to come up to select drive and click on it and then select the appropriate drive to copy your content over to come down with the pointer to add images and click this doesn't mean images as an art file it means images as in disk images then come down to image file or files and click to select it navigate over to the button that says add images and click on it at your desktop go over to the opl folder that you created and double click into it and then inside that folder go into dvd and double click into it then click on and select any of the isos you want to copy over to your hard drive and pick open you'll see a list of any iso files that you selected queued up and ready to go to begin the process of copying over the games to your hard drive navigate up to the start button and click on it you can optionally change the name of the game in the menu as it will appear on your hard drive and at opl and then click on ok to start the process just be aware that in real time it can take quite a long time to copy these files over to the hard drive you'll get a confirmation message that everything copied over successfully navigate over to the ok button and click on it to close the pop-up message at this point you're done with your pc you can close out windhip and you can also safely eject the usb drive with your arc files and safely power down the sata drive you're going to put in your ps2 in fact let's take a moment to cover that process right now so you can see how it's done the fat ps2 model has a door for the expansion bay on the back you'll need to remove this door in order to be able to put the hard drive in all you really have to do is just push down on this tab and then lift it right out but you might want to keep that door because it is still a part of your original playstation 2. next step grab the sata hard drive and the sata adapter for the playstation 2. the sata port needs to go into the bottom port on the sata adapter for the playstation 2. you can just push it in and they'll fit right together but one problem here it actually is kind of wiggly and loose and if you put this into the playstation 2 as is and just set it in here you're going to end up with this to eliminate this problem you can cut a piece of cardboard just smaller than the hard drive itself and put it underneath the hard drive when you put it in what this does is it creates a buffer between the hard drive and the case so that the hard drive won't shimmy inside the unit and it's also non-conductive which means you're not touching metal to metal so it's a safe deal now you can gently tighten down those two outer screws either with a flathead screwdriver or with a small coin this will secure the adapter to the playstation 2 so it doesn't come out once it's secured in place you can go ahead and plug in the playstation 2 plug in the video put the free mcboot memory card into slot number two and the usb drive into slot number one then plug in a controller and power on the ps2 with the memory card in slot number two you'll be able to launch free mcboot onto your playstation 2. when the menu system comes up you'll see a variety of different choices here the first thing you need to do is go down to opl or open ps2 loader and select it so that it can set up a partition on your hard drive scroll down with the d-pad select it with x when you go into opl for the first time all you have to do is take that yellow highlight and scroll down with the d-pad until you get to exit and then select exit with the x button this sets up a partition on your hard drive which we'll need to get to in just a moment select exit and then select exit to browser when the browser comes back up use the d-pad to scroll down until you get to launch alpha w launch elf then select it with the x button launch elf tends to be kind of smallish and low contrast so i'm going to zoom in here to make this easier to read i've also done as much color grading and sharpening as i can reasonably do press the circle button to go to the file browser and take note that circle is now moving you forward and triangle moving you back what you see here are a list of drives that are available to you on your playstation 2 with the selected drive highlighted in red use the d-pad to scroll down until you get to the one that says mass that's usb mass storage then select it with the circle button remember that art folder you copied over to your usb drive here it is use the d-pad to scroll down with the red highlight until you get to the art folder then press the right one it's the right shoulder button not right trigger button on the right side of the screen you'll get a menu that will pop up with additional menu choices copy will already be selected with an arrow just press the circle button to copy the art folder on the left side of the screen press the triangle button to go back one level in the directory until you get back to the list of drives from here press the d-pad up twice to get to hd d0 that's going to be hard disk drive 0 which is the hard drive you just installed in your playstation 2 then press circle to select it and the list of choices here all the way at the bottom you'll see plus opl that's a partition that opl created when you launched it just a moment ago that's why you had to launch it before you went into launch elf now select opl with the circle button to go into that partition and you'll see a list of folders here press the right one or right shoulder button to pull up that advanced menu then scroll down to paste and select it with the circle button and if prompted just add those art files to your existing art folder at this point you're done with launch elf but to get back to the playstation 2 free mcboot menu you need to power off and re-power on your console when the free make boot main menu comes back up this time scroll back down to get to opl or open playstation 2 loader and select it with the x button to launch it this time press the x button to go into the settings you'll need to change a very specific setting in here in order to be able to access the games on your hard drive from the settings menu continue to scroll down with the d-pad until you get to hdd device start mode press the x button and then change this from off to auto then press the x button to confirm the selection and once you've confirmed your selection scroll down to ok with the d-pad and select it with the x button although optional i would definitely recommend you go to display settings and select it with the x button because here's the deal if you don't all of those arc files you grab will not display use the d-pad to scroll down and make sure these three things are all turned on i would recommend that you turn on enable automatic sorting because that's going to sort your games into alphabetical order which is going to make a lot better sense than just a random list of games if you turn on enable automatic refresh it will refresh new games when you add them to your hard drive through that process we discussed earlier and finally i would recommend you scroll down and turn on enable cover art because if you don't you won't be able to see all that great artwork you went to the extra effort to download earlier at this point you're pretty much done with things you would likely want to change on display scroll down to ok with the d-pad and select it with the x button one more thing here that's really important if you don't come down and save your changes the next time you come into opl they will revert back to the defaults be sure to use the d-pad to scroll down with the yellow highlight to save changes and select it with the x button to save the changes you've made to your settings press the circle button to access the games on your hard drive and voila the artwork will display your games will be listed here and you can use the d-pad to select the game you want and launch it with the x button for even more great video game content check out this video here it's shown on screen in the desktop browser experience and it's also linked in the pinned comment and description below thanks so much i always enjoy our time together here on youtube and i can't wait to see you there in the next video

Channel: Blaine Locklair

Views: 91,577

Keywords: ps2 hard drive upgrade, ps2 hard drive adapter, ps2 hard drive bay, ps2 hard drive format, ps2 hard drive format tool, ps2 hard drive games, ps2 hard drive install, ps2 hard drive install games, ps2 hard drive max size, ps2 hard drive mod, ps2 hard drive not detected, ps2 hard drive not detected on pc, ps2 hard drive setup, ps2 hard drive size, ps2 hard drive softmod, how to download games on ps2 hard drive, copy ps2 games to ps3 hard drive, #blainelocklair

Id: vsiqBJvhZ88

Length: 19min 9sec (1149 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 05 2021