Read Matth3w's how-to. I followed it having never rooted the phone before and everything worked perfectly:
http://www.droidforums.net/forum/ha...-phone-2-1-rom-o-c-mm-boot-animation-etc.html
He's going to have the same problem. I rooted on Saturday for the first time. I started trying to follow Matth3w's guide, had it printed out and everything. But that same site had bandwidth exceeded, so I had to go searching for another link. Found one on alldroid but I read a poster yesterday or today that said that one's down now too.
Also - as awesomesauce as Matth3w's guide is (very much so!) - the links and some of the info are a bit outdated. It still references Sholes.info to get something needed to flash SPRecovery.
After all that careful, OCD planning, I ended up manually applying an update.zip to gain root and then using DMUpdater to finally get SPRecovery after ROM Manager was only booting into stock recovery when trying to flash either SPR or CW.
To the OP - as much as I wanted to do it all manually, I can tell you it is a heck of a lot easier to just read up on DMUpdater and rooting/flashing in general so you have some idea what's going on, then just taking the easy way to root & get SPR. Then flash whatever ROM you want.