How Can I safely mount and use my PS4 internal HDD on Psxitarch?

B

B4SHIN

회원 | Member
Original poster
회원 | Member
Mar 10, 2019
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Despite not being tech-savvy at all I was able to jailbreak my ps4 model and install Psxitarch with the help of tutorials on the net. The device I installed Psxitarch into it's a 16 gig usb stick, so I'm running out of free space since I want to download some games from Steam and dabble a bit with the Proton functionality to try out some Windows games.

Thing is, I was already afraid of trying and mounting the internal HDD since I'm not that knowledgeable; even so I became tempted and just clicked the mounting system option only to be shown with a warning window saying something like "...if you don't know what you're doing, be warned!...". I just clicked the 'X' icon on the window and the operation was apparently aborted.

Could any of you who know your stuff provide some sort of guide on how to mount the HDD for use (reading and writing) in Psxitarch in a safe way, without risking deleting or corrupting important data?

My model is an original FAT one, CUH-11xxx, deemed compatible with HDD mounting.
 
If I were you or anyone else I wouldn't do that... The PlayStation 4 security chip SAMU encrypts the hard drive and its partitions. You can of course dump the decryption EAP keys using some homebrew tools and mount the drive but I just wouldn't fiddle with it. One crash, one unclean unmount of the HDD or something else going wrong and you might end up having to reinstall your FW and losing all your installed games, app, saves and themes.

I would rather recommend to get a big portable HDD and load PSXITARCH from it. There you should have enough space to try out the Steam games and do even more. And keep the fingers away from the PS4 HDD. The PS4 security chip isn't dumb. You fiddle around and with a lot of bad luck you're paying for it.


Something general: What I personally don't get is why do people even use USB thumb drives for this? A sane person would think a little. Like: I want to install Steam and play some games, I want to install some emulators and load up ROMs and ISOs of my favorite retro games and etc... Why do you think that a USB thumb drive is enough for that? How does that thought even strike your minds? And then people come up with their "I found this somewhere in the drawer" USB thumb drives with small space on it. Also 75% of USB thumb drives are trash in terms of speeds for such tasks. The good ones are quite expensive but output easily over 100 MB/s write and far over 200 MB/s read rates. However how much sense does it make to buy a USB thumb drive that is fast and has maybe 128 GB for a high price when you can buy a 1 TB HDD with USB 3.0 for less? It has much more space and is fast, too. There you can fit everything you want to try out.
 
Guess you're right. I know little about computer stuff and took me a while before finding out that the Linux distro would be using what was left of space in the thumb drive as storage room; I just assumed that after installation the distro would automatically share the PS4 HDD memory for storage since the various tutorials I found on the net don't say anything about future storage, they just say you'll only need an USB drive with at least 12 GB and period. For the sake of economy I did just what I was told to.

Luckily I have a spare 240 GB SSD lying around and it seems it'll have to serve the purpose; I live in a developing country and everything tech-related here is so damn expensive. I'm thinking of buying a 'cheap' drive enclosure (case) with a USB 3.0 interface so I can use the SSD as an external drive for a new PSIXTARCH install. What are your thoughts on that?

Also, after the new install is complete, can I plug the drive back on my PC and transfer some files to the distro desktop folder? I have some pre-installed Windows games that I wish to test with Steam Play Proton on PSXITARCH and I don't want to download them all again. The reason for the test is because my PC lacks a decent video card and I want to see if the PC games would do better performance-wise using the PS4 hardware, since I can't upgrade my rig at the moment. And I don't run the risk of frying the PS4 if the games demand too much of the console hardware, do I?

Thanks in advance.
 
Using the SSD with a USB 3.0 drive enclosure is absolutely an option. I did this with spare 500 GB HDDs out of old notebooks. So that's a good plan :) .


About using the drive back on your PC to transfer files. Honestly I never did this Linux thing on my PS4. So I have no clue how the USB thumb drive looks after Linux is installed on it. The filesystem plays a big role. Like if it uses EXT2/3/4 you need special software to mount these partitions on Windows and access them. I have made the software available here.

The best would be to connect that USB thumb drive to your PC and see what it spits out. What partitions there are and see if you can mount them using Windows or the tool from the above link. More than that I can't help as I have no idea what the heck is going on during installation of Linux on that drive.

Alternatively just buy a cheap normal USB 3.0 hub and use that to connect Mouse, Keyboard and additional devices like a USB thumb drives with files you want to transfer to your Linux installation. So you have the USB 3.0 SSD in one port from where you run Linux and in the second USB port you have the USB 3.0 hub with the USB thumb drive, mouse and etc. You can open the USB thumb drive in the Linux file manager and move files around as needed.
 
Thanks for the information m0nad, as well as the link containing the filesystem compatibility tool, they turned out to be pretty useful. One adittional question if I may: I could only find a USB 2.0 hub around these parts (third world sucks); anything I should worry about when plugging it on the PS4 3.0 port, or will it just be slower?
 
Nothing to worry about as far as I know. Yes, it will be just a lot slower :(.
 
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