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Hi, thanks for reading. I’m a friend of Ben’s and he’s letting me put down this post. I run a small electronic music blog at astropope.com. If you have seen the post about how to boost wordpress audio with Amazon S3, then you know we are the guinea pigs to test a new breed of online music blogging.

Pompous? Maybe. Fun? Yes. If you like music as much as we do, you probably want to be wearing it around your neck 24/7. In my case, you want it to listen to on your public transportation commute to work. Right? Or you’re having a hard time transporting 100+ gigs of music to your FreeBSD workstation. I know the feeling.

In this article, I am going to show how to set up your Sansa e260 as a “dual boot” with Sandisk’s original firmware and the Rockbox software.

I am not an expert on the technical differences between MSC or MTP, but in order to install the Rockbox software, you MUST have your Sansa in MSC mode. In Sansa’s original operating software, you will need to navigate to the “Settings” part of the wheel menu. Within there, you will find an option to switch between MCP and MTP. Many Google searches will give you quite intoxicating information of the minute details of both protocols.

The first thing it would be nice for you to do is update the firmware (since mine was refurbished, I had to update the firmware). Download the firmware updater and install it. I cannot always guarantee the accuracy of that link, but if it ever goes down, go to sandisk.com and look around.

Once you have updated what I called the “OG” Sansa software, you are ready to start installing Rockbox. You can begin by going to the install page and selecting the appropriate device.

At the time of this version, we are working with version 3.1 of Rockbox and SanDisk Sansa e200. I tried Option 1, the Automatic Install, but this did not work for me as it constantly claimed it could not detect my Sansa device, so I opted for the manual install.

Download the archive for the Rockbox installation and extract the contents to the root of your Sansa’s file system. For example, H:\.rockbox

Once that has been completed, you can access both the Rockbox software and Sandisk original firmware by installing sansapatcher.exe.

You should now have a pretty sweet “dual booting” mp3 player. Upon reboot, it will default to Rockbox, but you can get to the “OG” by pressing left on the main control.

You have any problems, please let us know!

http://www.sandisk.com
http://www.rockbox.org