[Blade General] ssx2:
All credits for the tutorial goes to "hedgepigdanie" who wrote the original post in modaco

The dodgy ZTE firmware flasher

This method can help if your blade cannot boot at all. Consider it a LAST RESORT - people do this all the time and only make their situation worse. Only use it if all the above methods fail or if your IMEI is corrupt. Your IMEI will be lost in the process and you will need to use hex editing to fix it up afterwards. This method also requires windows. Most of this is taken from burstlam’s thread here, which you can also refer to (burstlam has posted screenshots which also help to show what to do). Do the following in order:

Boot into download mode and set up connection

Download and install the ZTE USB driver.

Put your phone in download mode by turning it on with both volume buttons held down at the same time. The screen will remain black, but the notification LED should briefly flash red.

Plug it into your computer. The phone should be recognised in windows device manager under “Ports (COM & LPT)” as “ZTE Handset Diagnostic Interface(DFU) (COMxx)”. Take note of the port number (xx). If your phone cannot turn on at all and the LED doesn’t flash, it is dead. Sorry about that.

Flash firmware

Download this file, which contains the ZTE flasher along with firmware to flash your phone with, and unzip it somewhere convenient.

Run “Flasher.exe” from the extracted folder. Press the exclamation mark and login as administrator with the password “ZTEsmt123”.

Under “SW Directory”, select the correct firmware folder inside the extracted folder (European Gen1 firmware or Chinese v880 Gen2 firmware). ONLY flash the one appropriate for your phone.

Leave the default settings as they are – “download cefs” ticked, “no backup restore” selected, and “download” selected.

Go to the “Option” menu and select “Port Config”. Set line 1 to the COM port that you observed in step 3, then press OK.

Press the purple arrow next to line 1 and wait for your phone to be flashed. When finished it should boot into FTM mode.

Edit "channel1.nvm" to hold IMEI

In the flasher folder, open the file “channel1.nvm” with HxD, or a hex editor of your choice.

Go to offset 0x1215. The IMEI is stored between offset 0x1215 and 0x121C. You need to read your correct IMEI from behind your battery and enter it here like this:

In 0x1215 put the first digit of your IMEI followed by A. For each successive pair of digits, enter the second digit followed by the first digit. For example: and IMEI of 123456789012345 would be recorded at 0x1215 as 1A 32 54 76 98 10 32 54. When done, save this file.

Restore channel1.nvm to your phone

Make sure channel1.nvm is in the folder next to the flasher with the correct IMEI.

Connect your phone to your computer and turn on your phone with volume down held. It should boot into FTM mode.

In the flasher, select “restore NV” and “RF/BT/IMEI/unLock info”, and press the purple arrow next to line 1. Your IMEI will now be restored to your phone.

Put clockworkmod in the recovery partition

Take out the battery and turn on the phone. Clockworkmod should load.

Clockworkmod is now installed to your phone’s boot partition. This means that if you install a ROM at this point you will overwrite clockworkmod. You must now flash the correct version of clockworkmod to the recovery partition.

Go to “mounts and storage”, and select mount USB storage. Connect the phone to your computer and copy the correct version of clockworkmod as a zip file (Gen1 for European Gen1 firmware, Gen2 for Chinese firmware) to your SD card, then install it using clockworkmod.

Restart your phone with volume down held. It should boot into clockworkmod. If it boots into FTM mode or does not progress pass the green android, reboot normally and make sure you flashed the correct version of clockworkmod.

You can now flash a ROM (If you flashed Gen1 firmware you can also upgrade to Gen2 via TPT). When you do, check your IMEI. If it is wrong, flash stock recovery in clockworkmod, boot into FTM mode, and repeat (correctly) above from editing channel1.nvm onwards.

Personally i had countered the following situations that put me in difficulty for a few moments:

as put in the download mode the led didnt blinked or turned red as it said it should behave in the tut

and the second part ... after checking the port in Device Manager i didnt noticed the exclamation mark on the driver that meant the driver should be updated ... so when i had to pres the purple arrow nothing happen as actually the flasher didnt recognized the Blade so i chose to update drive from the net and everything went just fine :)