The initial way of installing Rockbox on the Sansa e200R series seriously scare away lots of people, and some of those who have attempted to perform the install really should better have been scared, judging from their desperate cries for help in the forum etc.

Another downside of the initial procedure was that it required the user to download a binary-patched version of the original bootloader, a bootloader that is the property of SanDisk that we have no rights to redistribute – especially not a modified one.

The current work-in-progress method is to build an installer program that can be uploaded to the player and then it does the necessary patching live in the target, removing the need to download anything that isn’t clearly a product of the Rockbox project.

We still lack a working way for this on Windows though, so the current plan is to initially provide a live CD with Linux and the e200R installer on for the Windows crowd, but we’ll see how things evolve…