A week ago I encountered the crashing with GTAIV. Then I logged out of PSN and disabled the auto sign-in thingy. After that it went fine and I reenabled that thing again. But it crashed again. Then I did the enable/disable thing 2-3 times and concluded that my connection suxx on that day because it worked fine in offline mode. On the next day then only I could play GTAIV normally (with PSN logged-in + R*socialclub linked)

My machine is a 60GB JP launch unit.

Maybe it could be done if they ghosted the data in RAW format
But.. the image can only be read by that PS3 only. No point of ghosting the image if Sony replaces the system with another unit.