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What extacly is a ROM?

A ROM is a tweaked version of Android. It contains the entire OS, and it is flashed with SPRecovery, you have to be rooted to do this. Most ROM's will run faster then the stock one, and they come tend to come with lots of goodies. I recommend the Bugless Beauty series by Pete, and if your daring then try his Bugless Beast stuff. You can also flash a 2.1 ROM to see what its like, although it has some bugs and isn't optimized for the Droid.
 
"ROM" is actually the first syllable of the Latin word, "Roma-llama-ding-dong". Which loosely translates to, "Holy crap this thing is COOL!". ;)
 
There are a lot of different ROMS is there a specific ending to each ROM? I see some that are .rar some that are .tgz
 
I too am intrigued by all this root and rom talk. I'm just too nervous about hurting my baby.

Even being a seasoned linux vet, I was a little worried. I almost had a heart attack when it stayed at the eye screen for like 5 minutes, but I kept assuring myself it was normal, since I do remember reading that it happens.

There are a lot of different ROMS is there a specific ending to each ROM? I see some that are .rar some that are .tgz

That's just how they are packed. I'm not positive but I don't know if .rars can be used, I thought it was just tarballs. tar.tgz is just a gzipped folder. .rar is a WinRAR zipped folder.
 
ROMs that are distributed in .rar format are usually nandroid backups.

You will need to extract the folder from the .rar archive. It should have 4 files in it. A boot.img, data and system.tars, and a nandroid.md5 file.

Overall, there are three ways to flash a rom.

-Doing a nandroid restore
-Using an update.zip
-Installing a ROM (.tar)
 
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