As some of you PS3 owners have experienced, GTA IV is freezing. A lot. Two of my friends, 1 60GB owner and 1 40GB owner, have been unable to play because of the damned freezing. Upon loading the save, the screen would just hang at the name of the mission. If you quit the game, the PS3 reboots. I am a 60GB owner and have not had any problems whatsoever. Thinking it may be a bad disc (wishful thinking I know), I visited my 60GB brethren with my copy of GTA in hand.

After deleting the game data and NOT the saves, we ran the install from his copy. Booted up and tried to load the save. No go. Swapped his disc for mine and tried again. No go. Ugh. Looking through the 12 step process found via our friendly Internet, we disabled the Information Bar and turned off the Media Server setting too. Loaded up my disc and SUCCESS! So we swap it out again replacing my disc with his "bad" disc. No go. WTF? Could it be a bad disc?

Being the friend that I am, I left my disc with him so he could get some gaming in. I grabbed his copy, curious if I would suffer the same fate. Nope. No issues whatsoever. I call my 40GB buddy having similar freezing with his GTA and told him to delete the game data (again, NOT the saves) and disabled the info bar and media server settings. After doing just that, he was back in the homewrecking, job losing GTA life we all love.

Moral of the Story:

Delete the game data
Turn off the info bar
Turn off media server

Hope this helps anyone affected!