[Fascinate General] soba49:
I just want to know two things:

a) what makes Clockwork Mod essential

b) that I can flash another recovery over clockworkmod readily

I have googled, and I have searched this forum. This has given me several impressions, any of which may be wrong:

My phone comes stock with a download mode and a recovery mode, both accessible by button press combinations (vol +- & pwr / vol - & pwr) and via command line tools through the android development kit. Download mode is for flashing firmwares with a Samsung-specific firmware flashing program called Odin. Recovery mode essentially takes a .zip file and copies its contents on top of my android /system folder. There is an app called RomManager released by Clockwork. This app allows easy downloading of roms. Roms can be either kernels or tweaks to android settings. RomManager requires ClockworkMod to be able to do its thing, and it's the best choice for updating roms in terms of support and compatibility. Clockwork also provides the means of backing up your current system so that it can hopefully be flashed back to an earlier time. Other than that, there is nothing resembling version control for monitoring changes to your android phone.

There are several other things I still don't have a clue about: Does the underlying hardware have multiple firmwares? Can Odin (in a desperate situation) undo anything that ClockworkMod can do? Ie. is there something I can't touch so that I could always get the phone to a download mode, and flash back to sanity. What I read says that RomManager opens you up to ForceClose loops if you apply the wrong mix of updates, and Odin can outright fubar your firmware. Is it just a copy, or can some mods actually wipe my system and restructure it as they see fit. What the heck does PDA mode mean? Do I have to be sensitive about applying deodexed modifications, or will I just get some error messages, clear my cache, and apply a sequence of mods to get myself right again? How can I tell if I'm frozen (Ie. which processes take more than 5 minutes, less than an hour)? What's my most graceful way out of a crashed / flash? What items are in my carrier's domain, and which are universal - ie. which files do I have to find a version that are specific to my particular hardware? (Of course mods and kernels are specific, but what about RomManager and Clockwork Recovery itself). What do naming conventions tell me, .zip, .img, .tar, .md5 - couldn't there be some standardization telling which firmware/baseband/kernel/build is involved? I'm sure many of these answers would come to me with personal brick (I'd love to see an article on Soft Brick vs. Hard Brick by the way) experience, but I would much prefer to find a nice writeup here, or better yet, on ClockWork's home page. I don't actually expect answers to this section; I'm just trying to justify ways a newcomer can get really intimidated or confused. Those service contracts are expensive.

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely appreciate every post that's been placed up in the dev forums. There is a lot of great info in angel12's post and the 11 accompanying pages. He (and he isn't alone) contributes an enormous amount to these forums. I just wish I could find a complete primer on the topic, as I feel I'll never have the background I want to get started without actually packaging and developing myself.

Note: there is a post on removing clockwork for the EVO. Is it the same proc

http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=708395

* PIT: "the pit file is used by ODIN to know where to place the restore files."