Spaced Out ::

The first stage in replacing your stock Android phone, with a new ROM (for example CyanogenMod) is to replace the recovery partition on your device - for example here are the full instructions for my aging Moto e. When you attach your phone normally to a computer you need USB drivers to recognise it - and for the purposes of installing a new ROM you want to begin by using ADB to reboot your device to the bootloader. This is a pre-boot mode and gives you a number of limited menu options for your device. At this point you can change the recovery partition on your device using fastboot which can then be used to change the ROM (and so version of Android).

I was looking to put an unofficial port of CyanogenMod 11 (aka Android 4.4) doing this for my son’s ZTE Kis3 (cheap and chearful but extremely serviceable ZTE phone), however whenever I rebooted it to the bootloader it wasn’t recognised by my Windows PC. After a fair amount of searching I discovered two things:

1. the ZTE drivers clearly don’t support USB when rebooted to the bootloader
2. the drivers for fastboot should be *generic*

The latter is really helpful for this and potentially in the future - and led me to the Universal Naked Drivers which do what they say on the tin. *However* one big caveat is that they are unsigned and Microsoft (understandably) has made it very difficult to install unsigned drivers. So…. watch this YouTube demo that explains how to install them.

Worked for the ZTE Kis3 and the subsequent install of CM11.