Hey guys I'm new to modding and all. I've figured most of this time by checking out forums and reading various guides. However I'm having a situation.
Basically I installed the the solderless DMS chip I flashed my chip I installed toxicos. I did some research and I wanted to install an hd into the ps2 to cut down on loading time so I bought a 40g maxtor non-ps2 hd and the network adapter. I formatted the hardrive and I attempted to install a backup made using Alcohol 120% of scarface using the toxicos menu, and it tells me that the backup is not a valid ps2 disc. The game plays from the DVD-R perfectly.
I've tried several permutations and they all result in not being able to play the game from the hd. Just for kicks I put madden07 the original and it installed to the hd just fine from toxicos. Initially I used winhiip. The first time I tried ripping the files with winhiip straight from the backup I burned. Then I tried using alcohol120% to make an image of the backup disc and using winhiip to copy the image from my pc hd to the ps2 hd. When that didn't work I tried using DMS hdd format to make a partition on the ps2 hd and then using DMS hdd dump to rip the the data from the backup DVD-R to the hd. After that I tried going into the toxicos under the game/tool tab and installing the game and that didn't work either. I also tried installing tekken3 the original, which is a ps1 game and it gave me the same error that I recieved when attempting to install the scarface backup DVD-R.
Is there some sort patch to apply to the image before copying to the ps2 hd? Additionally I messed around with some of the toxicos setings such as atad patching hdd mode as well as the compatability modes for the game. I'm running out of ideas. I could just rent the game again and install to the ps2 from the original disc, however in the long run it's not going to be a good idea because I'll have to rent the original everytime I want to rip to the ps2 hd. Ideally I want to have my backups and the capability to install my backups to my ps2 hd. Does anyone have suggestions? i know this is a long post, and I wanted to be thorough. Additonally when doing the hd dump I got an error code of -203. I tried googling it and trolling through forums to no avail. If anyone can help out I'd appreciate it.
Ya know what I found the problem it had nothing to do with trying to rip from a backup DVD-R. I needed to apply a ppf patch for scarface. Not all games need a ppf patch I guess only games that look for a hd. I didn't think scarface looked for an hd when it booted. The patches are different for each game. I read that a ppf engine analyzes the difference between the original and the backup and the data that is diferent gets stored in the ppf file. I didn't bother analyzing the the original and backup I just found a site that already did that work so all I did is dl the patch for scarface and apply it in winhiip. In winhiip there should be a button available that says "apply ppf patch", it's pretty straight forward the hardest part is finding the patch. So in conclusion most ps2 games do not need a ppf patch if one is needed you need to find it. I did not install from toxicos and I did not use DMS HDD dump. I took the 3rd party hd I bought (use maxtor or seagate) which is an 80g maxtor ide. I found winhiip and extracted on my pc. Then I shut down the comp and hooked up the IDE drive (make sure the jumper is set to master,slave or cable select depending on the configuration of your pc to prevent hd conflict there shouldn't be more than one master per IDE channel, in layman's terms for each IDE ribbon cable there can only be one master as far as I'm aware of. ie. I had to set mine to cable select). Then I booted up into windows and open winhiip next you have to format the drive. There are a couple of different ways to format the drive with the ps2 filesystem., I chose to use the format button within winhiip. Once the drive is formated you can either rip data to an image file which is transferred to the hd or you can burn image/images from your pc hd, the image file doen't have to be .iso winhiip supports many different image file formats. After the image has been copied to the ps2 hd I applied the ppf patch. then I exited the program shut down my pc and disconnected the ps2 hd from the pc and attached it to my ps2. I press r1 after turning on the console to boot into toxicos. I select toxicos from the menu(it should be the menu option in the middle, below load disk and above settings. then I navigate to the game tab I select my game and hit the x button to play it. I hope this helps and saves some people a lot of headaches. I found several sites on how to install and format the hd but the whole ppf patch aspect wasn't so clear and the first back up i happened to try required the ppf patch. So there it is.
