Android: Restore FTM after clockworkMod

After a bad flash of a custom ROM, my ZTE Blade smartphone wouldn’t boot beyond the robot picture. I had no luck with restoring a previous made backup and so it was stuck.
Recovering with a stock ROM from the carrier was not an option because it involved restoring the FTM startup, which should not be necessary because ClockworkMod was working fine. So, in spite of this post’s title, I’'ll explain how to recover your Android back into a custom ROM without the need to overwrite ClockworkMod.
My personal feeling about the scenario is that something got really messed up on the system or boot partitions of the SD card. And turned out in the end I was right.
The first challenge was to how I was going to copy the .ZIP file with the custom ROM to the SD card if I was unable to boot the system. It’s a simple mount/unmount functionality on ClockworkMod:

1. Connect the phone to a computer.
2. Turn the phone on with volume down and power held.
3. In clockworkmod go to “mounts and storage” and select mount USB storage. 
4. Copy your custom ROM to the SD card.
5. Unmount USB Storage

The second challenge was to solve the boot problem and get past the darn robot screen. Since the suspects were the boot and system partitions and following a hint I got from the Web:

1. Go to “mounts and storage”
2. Format boot.
3. Format system.
4. Format data.
5. Format cache.
6. Finally format sd-ext.

To recover the phone into the custom ROM, it’s simple:

1. Go to “install zip from SD card”
2. Install the ROM you copied previously.
3. Restart your phone when it is finished.

You should be all set to go!
HTH.