[Nook Color General] cabbieBot:
Hello mods, surely haven't done one of these before but there seems to be a big hole in our knowledgebase here and I thought I'd take a stab at filling it. If I somehow overlooked another solution for this, feel free to take this down and also smack me because I turned the web upside down trying to find the answer before putting it together.

All that being said....I've now done this on two Windows 8 machines so I feel confident that it works. All of the following was done on a fresh install of the Android SDK by installing Android Studio with all default options. Get Android Studio here. You'll need to install Java first if you haven't already, you can grab Java SE Development Kit 7u75 here.

1) The first step is to disable driver signature enforcement on Windows 8, which is the cause of all this devilry that makes it seemingly impossible to install the drivers and get ADB working with the NookColor. Follow the instructions on this link: Disabling Signed Driver Enforcement on Windows 8

2) Download and extract the attached adb_usb.zip file. Take the adb_usb.ini file inside and drop it in your.android directory. If my Windows username is cabbieBot, then I find it here: C:\Users\cabbieBot\.android

Alternatively, you can just make this file yourself by opening up notepad, typing 0x2080 into it, clicking save, change dropdown from .txt to All Files, and save it as adb_usb.ini

3) Open Device Manager and plug in your NC. You will see NookColor under "Other Devices" with a yellow exclamation mark.

4) Download/extract the attached NookColorADBInstall.zip file.

5) Open Device Manager in Windows 8 You will see "NookColor" under "Other Devices" with the exclamation mark. Right-click on it and click "Update Driver". From here on out its all about just going through the right process of menus and dialogs.

6) Click whats in the red box: "Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer".

7) Just leave it on "Show All Devices" and click Next.

8) IMPORTANT STEP! Click "Have Disk"

9) Click "Browse"

10) Navigate to where you extracted the NookColorADBInstall zip and you'll select the "usbdrivers" folder inside.

11) Without restarting Windows with the driver signature check we'd hit a dead-end here but we good. Click "Next".

12) Tell the dialog to eff off and click "Yes"

13) Click "Install this driver software anyway".

14) DING DING DING! If you have your NC hooked in, you should now see it prompting you to accept the computer's RSA certificate which means your computer and nook are gloriously flirting, so lets check it out to be sure.

15) Navigate to where ADB lives, which on a default installation will be at C:\Users\cabbieBot\AppData\Local\Android\sdk\platform-tools. Hold SHIFT and RIGHT-CLICK in the folder to select "Open Command Window Here"

type:

adb kill-server

then....

adb start-server

then...

adb devices

When you see your device's serial number pop up, you are certifiably done. I decided I wanted to learn to build CM from source and the trusty old NookColor is a handy device to play on. If you are worried about the driver signature check being disabled, just reboot your computer because it doesn't survive a reboot. Hope this is useful to someone else even though dear old Encore is downright ancient at this point.