Hey, I came back with new findings.
I can confirm that resetting the PS3 to factory settings does not solve the problem, I even replaced the entire Harddrive which changed absolutely nothing except I now have twice as much space. I am 10 000% sure it's not the disc drive that causes the games not to load because even completely new downloadable games like Hell Yeah! are effected.
Also while I said the PS3 games can be made to boot up normally with some effort and that they play perfectly, well there were more issues. See the games DO run perfectly, but autosave heavy games like RE6 will eventually crash even if you get them to run because the saving mechanic freezes. The game continues to run perfectly, but in games like Tekken Tag 2 and Hell Yeah you can see the saving icon stays on the screen seemingly forever. If you exit the game (for some games it's enough to just go back to the main menu) or if the same process happens again, the console will freeze and then reboot itself. Basically what it means I can play a game for six hours in a row and have zero issues, or I can have a game get stuck before it's even booted up. It seems completely random and affects all games.
I thought replacing the entire harddrive (it's a different size AND different brand) would help the PS3 get the saving issue right (save files are stored localy after all) but it didn't help at all. I think this heavily implies that the firmware is the culprit here since it's the only thing that remained in place even after I replaced the harddrive.
Please have a look.
