Hopefully this will be the final post about God_of_War_2_USA_PS2-ECHELON

Since the last post: I beat the colossus. Then, at the cutscene where Zeus stabbed Kratos through the heart, the game froze. After that I gave up for a few days.

Today I got my hands on a DVD5 version of the game. I tried loading that to the HD with FastLordBogami. It didn't even get past the title screen.

The only thing I hadn't tried was transferring the game directly to the HDD with WinHIIP. I didn't do this because I didn't have access to my external hard drive enclosure.

I decided to try WinHIIP. I unplugged the DVD-RW drives from my computer, and plugged in the PS2's hard drive. Then, I transferred the original DVD9 image (God_of_War_2_USA_PS2-ECHELON) to the PS2. Unlike doing it over LAN, this only took 20 minutes. It takes about 1.5 hours to transfer the 8 gigabyte DVD9 image over LAN.

I loaded up my game. It worked. I started a new game. It got past the first cutscene, and the floor of the first area was, surprisingly, intact. I was able to save without the game freezing.

Right now I'm in the snowy area around the titan Typhon's chamber. Everything is working.

To sum it up, this is what I believe: The God_of_War_2_USA_PS2-ECHELON release works with the 0.8b version of HDLoader that is patched to be compatible with God of War II. It works by transferring the image from your computer to your PS2's hard drive with WinHIIP. Other solutions that I know of don't seem to work completely.