apascan v0.1 - Copyright (C) 2008 James Le Cuirot <[email protected]>
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http://playstation2-linux.com/projects/apa but it is badly outdated and does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.