Is there a way to have standard boot-up be the stock firmware?

[Slam]

I was wondering if on a Sansa Clip Zip you can have the default boot-up be the original firmware and have Rockbox as the secondary one. Is this possible?

[[Saint]]

Not really, no.

Not for an end user, at least.

It is possible, but it requires modification to the source code and recompilation - at which point, you'll be running and unsupported binary and no longer qualify for technical support (unless you can verify problematic behaviour on an official build, as well).

If you feel up to the task, myself or someone else would be happy to assist you in doing so.


[Saint]

[Slam]

Yes, please! Tell me where to start.

[bluebrother]

I would really suggest in not doing so. If you mess up (which can easily happen) you can end up with a player that doesn't boot at all -- you're messing with the bootloader after all. And in contrast to some other players there is no easily usable hardware fallback mechanism to recover from that.

[saratoga]

http://git.rockbox.org/?p=rockbox.git;a=blob;f=rbutil/mkamsboot/dualboot/dualboot.S;h=4e4dbe5505e783ebe443aa4ab6fb4248d7277487;hb=HEAD

You'll have to edit this file and then recompile ams patcher. Note that the code is in arm assembly and if you make a mistake you will most likely destroy your player. I recommend you not do this without carefully understanding the code and perhaps getting a spare player in case you break the first one.

[Slam]

Thanks for your warnings, but i still want to try. What would i need to change?

[[Saint]]

How committed to this are you?

First of all, you're going to need to set up a development environment.
I'm guessing you're using a Windows based host (because it is statistically highly probable), which means you're going to need to use a virtual machine¹ in order to run a unix based host within your current system.

Don't, under any circumstances, attempt to use CygWin or Interix compatibility layers².

Once you have a development environment  set up and are capable of compiling your own binaries, we'll go from there.


[Saint]


¹ - For this, you'll probably want somewhere in the order of at least 2GB RAM and 2GHz dual core CPU that supports virtualization natively, else it will be agonizingly slow.
² - These are not something I would recommend to someone taking their first steps in development at all. You would almost certainly need to undergo quite a bit of effort to get Rockbox building under Cygwin these days (I don't think any active developer uses it, because quite frankly it is terrible), and it is woefully slow and inefficient compared to a virtual machine.

[Slam]

I'm downloading the virtual machine now. I'd say I'm pretty committed.