Here's the original xda thread for SD and USB charging issues:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=695243
For those who have devices that are recognized by their PC but not when you run adb commands you could be looking at abd driver issue.
See if this helps:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=532719
Post #1, Section: "Im not getting a notification of Android ADB when i plug in my USB"
You could also try running recovery without the AndroidSDK, as outlined by FastRX8:
"You do not need android-sdk at all.
I have a laptop w/ Vista that has never been connected to my phone. I connected the phone, and it failed to see it. It looked for drivers, but failed. Only thing I could do was Charge or Disk Drive. Went into the disk drive and copied the HTC Sync file and installed it.
After it was done, I unplugged the phone, reconnected it w/ HTC Sync.
Then I downloaded the evo-recovery.zip, open the run command and typed "c:\evo-recovery\adb-windows reboot recovery".
Worked fine. Then I typed "c:\evo-recovery\recovery-windows.bat" and went right into recovery mode.
Never needed the sdk."
Good luck.