So lame... I never backed up.
I had a 120gb Fujitsu drive in there... my first mistake. I knew Fujitsu drives were junk from working on laptops for so long... but I figured a new one would be ok.... NOPE!
The PS3 was fine one day and dead the next. I turned it on ad it made the fancy sound... and that was it. All that was on the screen was the wavy pattern... no text. I turned it on and off for a while and finally it came on, but froze. I noticed the hdd light stuck on.
Next time I turned it off and on it said the hdd was corrupted. It tried to format, got to 61%, rebooted, and said it was corrupted again.
Pulled the hard drive, threw in a small one, and it worked fine.
So lame.
Luckily laptop drives are SO cheap now.
Just ordered a Seagate ST9320421AS... 320gb, SATA3.0, 7200rpm, 16mb cache with a 5 year warranty from newegg for $100.
Just a rant I suppose.