My PS3s optical drive puked 2 weeks ago and it's just been sitting idle since then. I figured I'd at least let it crunch until I can get it repaired and then found out the old USB drive setup no longer works.

Since I have no working optical drive I can't do the normal YDL install. Is there a way to do the entire install from a USB drive? I've got an 8GB stick as well as the old 512MB I was using before. Just wasn't sure if the install could be done from USB, and if so how I'd go about it.

Thanks in advance. :-)

Edit: After some more digging I found a way that says it works. Trying it now, or will be after the YDL 6.1 ISO is done downloading anyways.

For anyone that cares: http://www.yellowdog-board.com/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=5229

Seems like you can only edit once, so adding a reply.

Just some notes for anyone who wants to try this themselves.

- You need to make a /PS3/otheros folder on your USB drive and name the bootloader otheros.bld. When you plug that USB stick into the PS3 you should see an option to Install Other OS. That's all explained on the page, so I don't know why he's linking directly to the download rather than the instructions which include the download link here: http://wiki.pdaxrom.org/index.php/Bootloader_for_PS3

- You could probably put the whole YDL distro on the USB and mount it, it shows as an sdd device I think. I couldn't figure it out but didn't spend much time because...

- The website given in the post didn't work for me, or at least didn't appear to. Looked like YDL just hung during install and I had to power cycle to get out of it. Since I happen to have a web server on my network (duh, why didn't I use it in the first place) I just extracted the YDL iso to a folder there which IS working and was quite fast.

Semi off-topic, but if you don't have your own web server but would like one to tinker around with, I can't recommend the XAMPP package highly enough. It's so easy and includes a ton of supporting software, so even if you don't know your PHP from your Apache or your MySQL from your FTP server you can still setup your own local server with just a few clicks. Google it. (Not an advertisement, it's a package of free software put together into an also free managed setup, it's awesome).