A friend of mine owns a Launch 60g and a post-launch 20g. He has upgraded the HD in the 20g to 120g, and saved the 20g drive for emergencies.
His CE version of GTA4 has this game breaking bug on the launch 60g PS3. It plays just fine on his 120g one (former 20g).
He is now in the process of putting his 20g drive into his 60g unit, and going to test it that way. If it works, we'll have at least a handle on what may be going on.
This is very important to me, as I too have a 60g PS3, and will have my GTA4 CE copy tomorrow via Amazon/UPS. If a different HD actually enables the thing to work, I'm not going to complain about having a reason to upgrade my PS3 HD, as I can use the space for "stuff".
I'll do this like live-blogging....
*UPDATE* - HD Swap is completed, firmware upgrade going on as I type this.
*UPDATE* - Installing game now.
*UPDATE* - He's playing through now, results momentarily...
*UPDATE* - I said momentarily, but he's obviously doing /something/ in game, as he's not chatting about it at the moment.....
*UPDATE* - Success! Well, this was loaded from the save-game of his working 20g (120g) PS3. So, he's nuked it, reinstalling from scratch, and going to play though the beginning with a "new fresh" game, and see if that is it.
*UPDATE* - Total Success. With clean install, clean fresh new game. Past the game bug. This is HD related for the PS3. The launch model of the 60g PS3 hard-drive is the issue.
My friend tells me he may try to put the 60g drive into his working 20g (now 120g unit) reformat and try again. But, that isn't going to be tonight.
So, original launch 60g PS3 hard drive is a 5400rpm Seagate and fails. This isn't related to the PS3 /hardware/ and is hard-drive related.
Good information for all, spread it around.
If anyone needs more information, let me know and I'll try and get it and update all.
Mok