OK, so I got it to load/boot to rockbox once, but it wasn't displaying any fonts at all. I don't recall what happened after that (I tried "something"), but it got bricked - when booting, it would just flash the sansa splash screen, and I'd have to boot to the OF. Yay. So I followed the unbrick instructions and reformatted the thing and got it to boot up normally just fine. Tried to install rockbox again... STILL failed, same ol' flashing sansa splash screen. WTF? I did notice there was a post in here saying that some builds were messed up on Nov. 20... I'm not sure if that's my issue or not.
Also, when I installed in the second time, I used the rockbox utils thinger, and it first was giving me massive problems with being unable to find the device path - even though GNome sees the thing just fine. ?!
So I rebooted. Tried again. Then the utils program seemed to find the device OK (but NOT if I ran it as su or sudo, interestingly enough), but when doing a complete install it dumps to the desktop immediately. No progress bars, nothing. Very strange.
As near as I can tell, there is some sort of very stupid permissions problem going on. I think I am just missing something very obvious, so if anyone can give me a hand, that'd be great... I am running Ubuntu (hardy heron 8.04.xxx).
I've been all through the manual and the FAQ and was unable to find anything to assist me with my issue. Thanks in advance.
EDIT: nuked it from orbit and started again, but made sure to put it in MSC mode first. That, apparently, did the trick. The Sansa firmware even recognized my music folders (which lack _ and use spaces), yay. Now to see if the SD card will work . . .
In going through the process on a second unit, it appears that the firmware needed to get updated FIRST. I ran through the process outlined on the unbrick page, with copying the .mi4, creating sansa.fmt, and putting the priBootloader file on there after booting to manufacturing mode. That allowed me to change to MSC mode, and then install rockbox just fine.