apascan v0.1 - Copyright (C) 2008 James Le Cuirot <chewi@aura-online.co.uk> Distributed under the GNU General Public License v2 with no warranty. Description ----------- apascan scans the given block device (usually a hard drive) for the APA partition table format used by the Sony PlayStation 2. It then creates mappings for any partitions it finds, allowing you to use these partitions like normal Linux block devices. In order words, you can format them using mkfs/mkswap and mount them in the usual way. You can even mount games installed using HDLoader! Obtaining --------- The latest version of apascan can be obtained from Gentoo PS2's site located at http://gps2.aura-online.co.uk. Requirements ------------ apascan will only work on Linux 2.6 and possibly Linux 2.4 but the latter is untested. It will not work on Windows, OSX or BSD so don't ask. This is because it makes use of Linux's device-mapper. Ensure the device-mapper is enabled in your kernel, either built-in or as a module named dm-mod. Its configuration name is CONFIG_BLK_DEV_DM and it can be found through menuconfig under Device Drivers -> Multiple devices driver support (RAID and LVM). libdevmapper is also required. This is probably available through your distributions's package manager but it can also be obtained from http://sourceware.org/dm. Installation ------------ The usual mantra of "./configure && make && make install" should do the trick. See INSTALL for more details. Usage ----- Run the program using "apascan -h" for information on how to use it. All mapped partitions will appear under /dev/mapper. Bugs ---- No bugs as such have been found yet. Badly written partition tables may cause a problem but this is not really the fault of apascan. There is currently no support for hard drives larger than 127GB, either through 48-bit LBA or ToxicOS's APAEXT partition table format. Please file any bugs you find at http://gps2.aura-online.co.uk. Make sure you choose the "apascan" component. ps2fs ----- Some partitions such as "HDLoader Settings" are formatted using the ps2fs filesystem, which requires an additional driver. There is one available from http://playstation2-linux.com/projects/apa but it is badly outdated and does not work with recent versions of Linux. A FUSE-based fork of this driver has been created at http://ps2fs-tng.googlecode.com but it appears to read the entire disk rather than individual partitions so it is unlikely to work in conjunction with apascan. It has not been tested. Partitioning ------------ There are a number of tools available for manipulating APA partition tables. HDLoader and its associated tools, such as hdl_dump, will format any hard drives they do not recognise but since they are only concerned with games, they do not allow you to add empty partitions. The DMS HDD Format Tool does allow you to do these things but a recent test found that it created a partition table that nothing besides itself and uLaunchELF were able to read. This needs to be further investigated. ps2fdisk allows you to manipulate traditional PS2 Linux partitions (those named __linux) but ignores all others. Finally, there is the official Sony HDD Utility Disc but this has not been tested at all. License ------- apascan is distributed under the GNU GPLv2 with no warranty. See COPYING for more details. It would have been distributed under v3 but the ps2.h file, which was taken from MontaVista's 2.4.17 PS2 Linux kernel, was distributed under v2 only, making it incompatible with v3.