How to flash a custom ROM on a Sony Xperia S

The thing is, it's really weird!If you're here to root, you're in the wrong place, go HERE to unlock your bootloader then HERE to root.

This is a guide made by me, spending about 6 hours to figure out how to do it.

The idea behind it is basically tricking the phone into thinking it's booting normally, but it actually boots to the recovery.

Apparently, every ROM has its own recovery inside it, you flash that first then you flash the ROM from its recovery.

Prerequisites:

- You need to have your bootloader unlocked

- You need to download a custom ROM

- (optionally) You need a gapps package.

- You need ADB and Fastboot installed.

- You need a USB to micro USB cable (a fancy way to say "normal USB charging cable" :P ).

Let's Do It!

- Turn off the phone

- Hold the volume up button

- While holding, connect the phone to the PC via the USB cable

-- When the LED lights blue, you're in the bootloader.

- Extract the boot.img file from the ROM zip file.

- Open CMD

- Get to the directory where the boot.img file is located.

- Type this into the command prompt:

fastboot flash boot boot.img [ENTER]

fastboot reboot [ENTER]

-- The first command will flash your recovery

-- The second command will reboot the phone, eventually rebooting to the recovery.

- Flash the ROM zip file from recovery.

- (optionally) Flash the gapps package.

- Reboot

And that's it! You're now on a custom ROM! Have Fun!