Light Installation

With ARK you can achieve the most lightweight CFW experience with minimal steps. Once you have ARK with cIPL installed, but not Full Flash Installation, you can do the following steps to turn the CFW into a Lightweight Installation:

• Option 1 (via PC): open /PSP/SAVEDATA/ and delete the ARK_01234 folder.
• Option 2 (via PSP): open savedata utility, locate the ARK savedata package and delete it.

Without the Savedata folder you will still have a full-fledged CFW (with ISO loading, custom PS1 games, homebrew support, plugins, settings, etc). You will however need to manage a few things a bit more manually since you won't have helper tools like VSH Menu, Recovery Menu or Custom Launcher, but that can be circumvented:

• For plugins you can simply manually edit PLUGINS.TXT in SEPLUGINS folder.
• Similarly, you can simply manually edit SETTINGS.TXT in SEPLUGINS folder.
• You can use Vanilla Mode instead of Recovery Menu, simply hold Start and/or Select whenever booting up the console or a game to temporarily disable settings and plugins, this fixed almost all issues.

Note that traditional CFW would use the terms Live and Light interchangeably to refer to CFWs that did not persist on boot (back when Infinity didn't exist and cIPL was only for 1k and early 2k). None of these traditional CFWs could be considered "Light" in terms of "Lightweight", except for some HENs like ChickHEN and TN-HEN and maybe the very earlier versions of PRO before it became a full-fledged CFW. Contrary, a Light install with ARK does require the CFW to persist with cIPL, otherwise you'd have to use Live installs, which requires the savedata folder thus you can't have a Live and Light install at the same time.