4EXTRecovery

[jebinio]

hi

A newbie question: To boot into recovery and flashing a theme or a rom, do my phone have to be rooted?

Is there an eeeasy way to root my phone?

 

[notebook]

You can boot into recovery from the standard boot screen that you'll get from doing a standard hard reset (factory reset) on an unrooted phone, i.e. remove battery for 30 seconds, hold volume button down while pressing the power button, etc. However, you can't flash a ROM using this unless you've rooted your phone first. Even then, I wouldn't use the HTC Recovery option to do this, but something like ClockworkMod, instead.

For any kind of 'flashing' (including flashing a ROM) you'll need to root your phone. Currently, the easiest way is with Revolutionary. It's still in beta: it won't necessarily be user friendly, so make sure you read and understand all the literature about it first and are aware of the risks involved.