wraggster
January 1st, 2008, 17:05
News from Chewi: (http://forums.ps2dev.org/viewtopic.php?t=9563)
I've written a program for Linux that scans APA partitioned hard drives and uses Linux's device-mapper to create block devices for each partition. This means you can plug the hard drive into your PC and work directly with any Linux partitions you may have on the drive. No more fudging around with sector offsets! You can even mount installed games as ISOs, though I'm not sure whether that's really very useful.
This program could also potentially be used to boot the PS2 into Linux from an APA partition. It runs in userspace but an initrd/initramfs could do the necessary work before the system boots. I have Linux 2.6 in mind here but MontaVista's APA code is adequate for 2.4. I did try and update that code for 2.6 so that everything could be done in kernelspace but the non-contiguous partitions made it too messy.
Anyway, it's actually not 100% finished yet, it doesn't seem to get the offsets for the additional partition segments quite right but it's nearly there and you can still see it in action.
It's ready now. It seems to work well, the only problem I've had is that the DMS HDD Format Tool appears to create partition tables that not even hdl_dump, let alone apascan, can read. uLaunchELF can read them though. Maybe this isn't really a problem but I expected it to work and I want to know what's up with it.
http://gps2.aura-online.co.uk/trac/gentoo-ps2/wiki/apascan
I've written a program for Linux that scans APA partitioned hard drives and uses Linux's device-mapper to create block devices for each partition. This means you can plug the hard drive into your PC and work directly with any Linux partitions you may have on the drive. No more fudging around with sector offsets! You can even mount installed games as ISOs, though I'm not sure whether that's really very useful.
This program could also potentially be used to boot the PS2 into Linux from an APA partition. It runs in userspace but an initrd/initramfs could do the necessary work before the system boots. I have Linux 2.6 in mind here but MontaVista's APA code is adequate for 2.4. I did try and update that code for 2.6 so that everything could be done in kernelspace but the non-contiguous partitions made it too messy.
Anyway, it's actually not 100% finished yet, it doesn't seem to get the offsets for the additional partition segments quite right but it's nearly there and you can still see it in action.
It's ready now. It seems to work well, the only problem I've had is that the DMS HDD Format Tool appears to create partition tables that not even hdl_dump, let alone apascan, can read. uLaunchELF can read them though. Maybe this isn't really a problem but I expected it to work and I want to know what's up with it.
http://gps2.aura-online.co.uk/trac/gentoo-ps2/wiki/apascan