Uncharted 2, PS3 crashes - fatal error if you die on chapter 23???

I was doing my first playthrough, stopped in the middle of Chapter 23 (Reunion). Next day tried to finish. Uncharted loads up fine. Hit the "resume game" like usual. Get nothing but the loading screen (spinning dagger) and my PS3 is COMPLETELY unresponsive, solid yellow and green lights. Have to manually shut down. After five or so attempts I figure maybe the save file got corrupted and my game is lost. Decided to try and "select" chapter 23 and start a new save. Hopeful workaround to complete the game. Seems to work. Start up and go through chapter 23 again from the beginning. Get to the point around where I last left off, I'm unlucky enough to die again at the same spot where I left off last time. Then the same damn loading issue happens again when it tries to resume from the checkpiont. Loading, Loading, PS3 is frozen on the loading screen. WTF??? Is there a known bug in chapter 23 that crashes the PS3???? I can't even get back to the PS3 menu.

This pisses me off as it was my first playthrough and now I've tried a few things and apparantly can't finish the game (unless I can get through there without dying, I was trying on hard difficulty on first playthrough). It's a PS3 slim BTW. I can't be the only one that's run into this. My PS3 hasn't been having any problems with any other games, just Uncharted 2.

Idk I never died when i played it. :P lol Just kidding but no but mine froze in like chapter 24 I think but after i restarted it everything worked again.

It froze up on me once (also in ch. 23 I think), but all I did was just shut down the PS3, cut it back on, and everything was fine afterwards.

Dude... clean your disc. I had EXACtly the same problem. Looked at disc and had smudge on it. Wiped it and game has been fine ever since. I think the PS3 can't load the data and just gets locked in a never ending cycle. GIve the disc a wipe even if it looks clean. Worked for me and some others have had same issue.thetruespin

DUDE!, I just bought the game 3 days ago and have never touched the disk other than taking it out of the case to insert into the PS3. I then took it back out when I ran into this problem on chapter 23 (to test and make sure it wasn't my PS3 that was the problem). There were no smudges and yes, that is one of the things I first thought of.

Miraculously it finally worked when I attempted to play the chapter again in the chapter select instead of "resume game". (I just had to start chapter 23 again for the THIRD time, which is a little irritating). I guess that I originally had a corrupt game save. Now I'm on chapter 25 so we shall see if it's smooth sailing the rest of the way. I did find a few other people on other websites that had the same issue ON CHAPTER 23 (and 24), so I'm guessing something is going wrong to corrupt certain people's loadfiles. It obviously is not a widespread problem, but searching the net it seems like the idential thing has happened to a few others and it seems to happen late in the game.

Chapter 23 had known problems I think... all firmwares, yeah? Just double check in case.Adziboy

Yeah. I found a few other people discussing it on other websites. Not sure what is going on. Going to chapter select seems to work OK. Hopefully it doesn't do it again if I try the game on crushing. I might smash a controller if I lose progress there. It's bad enough having to do all over again on hard.