I have or had old phat PS3 with a 500Gb hard drive and it crashed without warning. I wasn’t even using it very much AT ALL!!!. Unlike most, my YLOD finished with a solid light. I was able, with MUCH difficulty, to open it up, remove the game, reset the eject system. After barely being able to put it back together and now I have the blinking light. I’m thinking of trying the hair dryer a SECOND time!!! But mostly the videos with my newborn, photos. The saved games and things like it, I can live without but not the rest, it’s my baby’s life on there. I got a Slim 500GB today, what a difference ( not for the best!). PLEASE, what is the most likely way to retrieve this data somehow. Any ANGEL advice would give me a piece of mind and comfort for my soul. Thank you and God bless
Heh, nice necro but since it’s relevant no worries 
After spending a few minutes Googling recent (year or less) solutions it looks like there might be a couple of recovery utilities that can at least get some of the files you want off of the system. But it makes no mention of encryption but it sounded like media files might not actually be encrypted or the utilities might get around it. So if you want to go that route then do what I did and search. But I’d definitely do a bunch of research before installing anything that claims it can help. I don’t want to mention names here because I have not used them and won’t recommend them due to that.
You really should look at all the free places that you can put pictures like that and not use something like a PS3 harddrive for storage. Google Drive, MS’s OneDrive, Dropbox etc. that mirrors your HD copy. Or at least PS+.
Something like this might help if you don’t feel like connecting the PS3’s HDD inside your PC.
The PS3 HDD uses Fat 32, so there shoudn’t be any issue for a PC to just read the Drive.
[Edit] Disregard, incorrect info
Really?
My brother’s PS3 YLOD’ about 6 months ago. I pulled out the hard drive, plugged it into a computer and got absolutely nothing.
So unfortunately, all his save files and whatnot were all lost.
You know what I need to test this out. I got a busted Phat PS3 here thats been gathering dust (the blu ray drive is not working) and the same kind of USB adapter.
[edit]
Okay I was sorta wrong (I read the PS3 uses Fat 32, but this is a half-truth, the PS3 can read from a external Fat32 drive for file transfers and backup)
The actual PS3 internal HDD uses some file table where everything is encrypted, every PS3 HDD is unique to it self, its set up to be only read by the console it was initialized for.
So if you try transplanting the HDD to a new PS3, the console will want to re-initialized the drive thus reformating it.
With Custom Firmware PS3 consoles, and if you have dumped eid-root-key, you could try to access the drive and read and write.
otherwise the only thing you could do is read only.
I am trying this now, I will comeback with my results.
http://www.wondershare.com/disk-utility/ps3-hard-drive-recovery.html
I am not sure this would work for me, as I already transferred data from this old Phat PS3 to a Slim PS3.
So this HDD could be empty.