[EVO 4G Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] omegasun18:
I am in an overly good mood today so i will help out with some basic information

What is : nand recovery, back up, restore - A nand back up is basically a way to back up your phone its rom and settings. a nand restore uses the a nand back up you made to put your phone back to where is was when you made the nand back up (think about a restore point on a windows computer very similar concept).

What is: flashing - Flashing is the process used to install system files. this is usually done through a recovery which i will get into below. the reason it is called flashing and not installing is because it needs to be done through recovery and is a slightly different process but in more basic terms it is basically installing your rom or radio or other system critical pieces onto the phones internal memory.

What is: recovery - a recovery is basically a program that lets you access some advanced system features, these include nand back up and restore, wiping cache, data, and dalvik, and the ability to flash (install) certain files to your phone. to get into a recovery with your phone off hold volume down and the power button you will load to a white screen with several options (this is the hboot or bootloader) select recovery.

What is: sd card, what is stored on it - Out of the gate your sd card is set up as it should be. their are a few reason you might change this however with 2.2 it has become less of a need and i recommend just leaving it be. The main reason people configure there sdcards is to allow a script called apps2sd to work. what this does is it allows you to store all your apps on the sd card they are normally stored on the phones internal memory. Froyo or 2.2 (the android os version on your phone) has the ability to allow apps to move to your sd card through the settings. now this doesn't work for all apps as it has to be turned on by the app creator but many it will. Because of this i would leave your sdcard alone while you learn the ropes.

What is a : rom - a rom is basically the operating system of your phone. what a rom does is replace the default os with a custom one that has been tweaked or built by a developer. this is the piece of the phone you interact with.

What is a :kernel a kernel is basically the software that translates what you do in the rom to the hardware. think of it as the phones steering wheel. you let the phone to do this and the kernel interprets it so the hardware knows what to do,

How do I flash them? To flash files is relatively easy you place them on the root of your sd card (basically drag and rop onto the sd card but not in any folder). then you boot into the recovery. in the recovery you shoudl be able to find the options to wipe cache, wipe data/factory and wipe dalvik. you select each of these and then yuo select flash .zip from sd. next you scroll to the file you want to flash (the rom or kernel etc you want) and select it (normally power button) you should then flash the rom. once it is flashed select back until you see reboot phone and then reboot it and you should boot up with your new rom.

What is "s" off and "s" on - s on and s off is basically the way you can tell you are rooted in the bootloader (or hboot i talked about above) at the very top you should see one of these options. what these mean is whether your phone requires a signed file (s on) or whether it can flash unsigned files (s off). for now just consider a signed file as an official file with an unsigned file being unofficial or modded.

Now hopefully this explains a bit of the basics better and gives you enough information to better understand what is going on. My recommendation is to take the steps to root flash etc 1 at a time it is easy to read through all the instructions and go wow this is confusing. it really isnt as bad as it seems and as long as you follow each step you should be fine. just do exactly what each step tells you to do and dont worry about the next steps till you are there. you still have a lot to learn and the best way you can learn it is by searching the forums think of it as your library.

many people are glad to help however as you can see from some of the posts it is expected that you at least try to learn and research things for yourself. if you get stuck on something ask and you will normally get an answer just try remember if you cant take the time to search and research things you shouldn't expect others to take the time to help. i'm not saying you did i ma jsut giving advice for the future.

anyway best of luck and hopefully this will get you in the right direction.

NOTE: i have "dumbed" down some of the explanations to give the jiest of the idea with out getting to technical so for those that are more technical it is on purposse.