Is my PS3 doomed...?

[tehJP]

So I turned on my PS3 over the weekend and the fan started blowing a gale... Not actually sure whether it was displaying anything on the TV as I hadn't changed the channel over yet.

I think I had to resort to turning it off at the back and giving it a few seconds to chill out. After turning it back on it was fine and I watched a bit of a DVD without any problems.

Is this an early warning sign for something nasty..?

On a similar note, this morning I tried to play Uncharted3 and after the menus I got an endless loading screen and the power button was unresponsive. The only thing that was responsive was the eject button and ejecting the disc then freed up the power button so I rebooted and then tried again but this time it didn't even get anything up on the screen after trying to load the game from the XMB... ejecting the disc though seemed to fix things and the health warning appeared on screen behind the 'please wait while we quit back to the XMB' warning due to the disc eject. So I inspected the disc and it had all this lame ass gunk on it and what looked like a load of dents in the disc... gonna try and clean it up tonight and hope they just looked like dents... lord knows how it happened... the DVD I watched didn't seem to have any issues so I'm guessing my baby hasn't shoved something nasty in the disc drive...

That was just to get it off my chest rather than looking for help... though maybe it's related to the other problem or something...

One of the difficult things is I don't know anything about the age of my PS3... I've had a PS3 for the last 4ish years, a 40GB but a while back the bluray laser died and i had insurance from GAME, just, and they returned an 80GB to me... so lord knows how old it really is!

[Sephiroth]

My 80gb ps3 also wouldn't load uncharted 3 (endless loading screen and stuttering music) and its been getting slower over the past few months and regularly getting stuck. I didn't get any gunk though like you mentioned but it sounds as though its getting too old.

I bought a slim and transferred my things over.

[tehJP]

the issues loading would be down to the fact that the disc was probably completely unreadable and the PS3 just kept on trying to read it causing the game to hang.. why i managed to get through to the loading screen to the game first time but couldn't even get passed the health warning screen after that I don't know... which sort of suggested to me that the drive was ruining the disc each time it tried to run... not ideal...

i've got some OPSM demo discs lying around that i might try out to see if they get destroyed or not!

[ShadowGandalf]

the loud fan thing means you triggered the fan test. i think it happens when you press eject immediately after switching on... don't worry about that. i've accidentally done it once or twice.

if the power button on the front doesn't respond after a freeze... hold it down for a few secs... if that don't work, hold it down for 10 secs to do a force shutdown... i don't think it's a good idea to use the switch at the back while the system is on...

cant explain what happened to your disc though... odd.

[tehJP]

Hmm well.. it was the wife turning it on that caused the fan to go mental so yeah she probably hit the eject button too soon... (should have known about the fan test having worked for Sony but it's literally never come up lol)

So here's hoping my Uncharted disc is gonna be ok... otherwise I'll be begging/stealing from work colleagues I guess... though it would be nice to get some trade-in monies from my own disc of course!

[tehJP]

Uncharted 3 liiiiiiives!