PlayStation 3 is a very popular and powerful gaming console. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of games available for PS3. However, you don’t have to use all power just to run games. After Jailbreaking your PS3 you can easily run Linux on the console. You can use it as FTP server, install apps, backup your games on the internal hard disk and much more. Although the first few jailbreak solutions for the PlayStation 3 console were solely based on a USB drive, newer solution just require a a custom firmware downloaded from the internet and any USB Pen Drive or Hard Drive. Many of the solutions also include using an Android phone or a dev-board. We are only going to show you the easiest and safest jailbreak solution available to-date.
Please note that although this solution has been tested and tried by hundreds of thousands of PS3 owners, we don’t take responsibility should anything happen to your console. This is easily the best jailbreak solution available and doesn’t brick your console. However, we won’t be responsible if it does. If this is a concern, you should just stop reading and continue doing whatever you were doing.
For those of you that are still reading, follow the below instructions exactly. This guide is only for 3.55 firmware users. If you have a older firmware, you can follow this guide to upgrade to 3.55 firmware. 3.55 Firmware on PS3 is 100% hackable and most safe and stable. For those of you that are concerned that you need to have any original game in the tray, you can just use any original game you have for games that don’t work discless. If you don’t have access to an original game disc, you can just use a PlayStation Magazine disc available at the Sony stores for free.
Below are the instruction for installing/upgrading to 3.55 firmware and then using a custom firmware to jailbreak the PlayStation system. If you are already on the official 3.55 firmware, you can either reinstall the firmware or skip to step 4 to continue with rest of the process.
1) Download the official 3.55 PS3 firmware for your console. Since Sony doesn’t allow you to download official 3.55 firmware anymore, you have to use another source. We have the original PS3 3.55 firmware and you can download it below.
Download: Official PlayStation 3 3.55 firmware
md5: ca595ad9f3af8f1491d9c9b6921a8c61
2) After you have downloaded the official 3.55 firmware using the above link, rename the OFW3.55.PUB file to PS3UPDAT.PUP. Format a USB pen drive or external USB hard drive using FAT32 file system and create a folder called PS3 in it. Open the PS3 folder you just created and create another folder called UPDATE in it. Copy the PS3UPDAT.PUP file to this newly created UPDATE folder. The path of the new file should be as follow:
\PS3\UPDATE\PS3UPDAT.PUP
3) Start your PlayStaion 3 console and insert the USB drive into the USB slot. Go to Settings > System Update and select >Update via Storage Media. Don’t turn off your console while the firmware is being installed. You are now on the 3.55 official firmware.
4) Now put the USB drive back into your PC or Mac computer and delete the PS3UPDAT.PUP file. Download the 3.55 custom firmware from the below link and rename CFWkmeaw.PUP to PS3UPDAT.PUP and put it into the \PS3\UPDATE forder you created earlier.
Download: kmeaw 3.55 Custom Firmware for PlayStation 3
md5: 2be5e87a22bf1e7f48e98fcabd38977b
5) Now insert the USB drive into your PS3 console again and go to System Update option again.
Settings > System Update > Update via Storage Media
If will ask you to confirm installation of Kmeaw 3.55 firmware. If it says you already have this firmware installed, put your console in the recovery mode and try the installation again. Congratulations, your PS3 is now jailbroken and you can install hundreds of Homebrew and other packages on you kmeaw 3.55 powered PlayStation 3 console.