This article mentions rooting, Nandroid, and flashing of custom ROMs. If you’re unfamiliar with some of the terms, hit up our primers on This article mentions rooting, Nandroid, and flashing of custom ROMs. If you’re unfamiliar with some of the terms, hit up our primers on rooting custom ROMs , and Nandroid backups

The Droid X, Motorola's and Verizon's current flagship handset, has been rooted earlier this month (method 1, method 2), and today Koushik Dutta, the author of ClockworkMod recovery and the lead developer behind CM6 for Droid, released the first working recovery for this beast.

This means that users can now easily back up and restore their handsets using Nandroid backup, whether to get back to a certain state in the past or to roll back to a good state due to accidental "bricking" - a situation which is common for those treading in the undocumented territory that is the Droid X internals.

While getting a custom recovery environment running on the Droid X may have been "a bitch" for Koush to develop (those are his direct words), the labor intensive process will soon prove to have been worth it. Koush states that custom ROMs may soon be possible (albeit not directly, but as Koush says, just about anything is possible with full access to the system partition on an Android device). He also says that an update may soon be available for ROM manager to make things a bit easier in that department.

For those of you that are concerned with the technical details, Koush's custom recovery works by mimicking the phone's "logwrapper" binary and subsequently boots ClockworkMod Recovery by unmounting the system partition to prevent Android from starting. The recovery application has full access to /system. I tried it out on my Droid X and was able to make a full Nandroid backup.

As we wait to have the capability of flashing custom ROMs, such as CyanogenMod, this will certainly help out users who have been looking to get adb access to their device in the event that it is not booting correctly. I know it would have certainly helped me out earlier today (long story).

Hit up the source for full instructions and downloads.

Credit: Koush at My Brain Hurts