Sansa Clip+ available flash ram on a "2GB" device

[Jason Arthur Taylor]

I was wondering if the 13 MB firmware for the clip v2 and possibly the clip+ somehow goes to the flash ram in a hidden partition or something, since some people (sp?Paul Lauden?) have said the clips have too little ram to run much.  So I just did an experiment.  Formatted player and did a dir.  If the sizes are different from 2GB that that might explain how it has such a big bios. In case this is of use to somebody down the road working on the clip v2 or clip+ (I think having the same chips), here were the results I got:

Code: [Select]

C:\util>format e:
Insert new disk for drive E:
and press ENTER when ready...
The type of the file system is FAT.
Verifying 1856M
Initializing the File Allocation Table (FAT)...
Volume label (11 characters, ENTER for none)? 999
Format complete.

1,945,894,912 bytes total disk space.
1,945,894,912 bytes available on disk.

       32,768 bytes in each allocation unit.
       59,384 allocation units available on disk.

           16 bits in each FAT entry.

Volume Serial Number is 5EDE-E812

C:\util>dir e:
 Volume in drive E is 999
 Volume Serial Number is 5EDE-E812

 Directory of E:\

File Not Found

C:\util>touch e:\i

C:\util>dir e:
 Volume in drive E is 999
 Volume Serial Number is 5EDE-E812

 Directory of E:\

01/01/2010  08:28 PM                 0 i
               1 File(s)              0 bytes
               0 Dir(s)   1,945,894,912 bytes free

C:\util>

2GB=2147483648 bytes

I am probably wrong, but some google snippet I saw said the fat should take up 2MB=2097152 bytes of space, so there should have been only 2,147,483,648 - 2,097,152 = 2,145,386,496 bytes available.  So the missing space is 2,145,386,496-1,945,894,912 = 190.2500 MB.  I was expecting a smaller #, like 10-20MB.  This bigger # would suggest that there is plenty (190MB) of space for sansa to stick stuff like the firmware/bios.  I have no clue what I'm doing, and I am sure I am missing something real basic here, but am posting it anyways since this player is being returned to Sansta on the grounds that nobody here is really trying to port rockbox to it, and this is the last chance for me to do this experiment.


Cheers

[saratoga]

The firmware is on a part of the flash not exposed via USB, which is why we cannot get the firmware file from the Clip+.

Regarding how the firmware is loaded into RAM, have you looked at the wiki?

http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/SansaAMSFirmware

The firmware is basically composed of a series of small blocks which can be loaded into RAM depending on what the player needs to do.