Flashing MotoRokr E8 on Vista

Just bought motorokr e8 as a backup fone for 7k. That's 4k less than the prevalent price in the market. Turned out motos are hacker's heaven. These are Linux based, community is as active as open source one, bug fixes are rapid, multiple flavors exist, and with very little head banging, you can make your phone do what you want it to do... Bloody they've even made a telnet possible from the phone! Add to it the shiny looks, a great music player and modeshift keypad... damn this is a beauty to own!
All the contnent here after has been largely derived from people at mmus.us and http://www.motorolafans.com. I relied quite a lot on the posts by people with nikhil007 and bestwebs as screen names. I am flashing nikhil007's firmware version as it had good reviews and combines popular features from 3 different firmware distributions. It was good to see a real indian active in open source scene and come out with a product that everybody appreciates. This is the second great product by an Indian in open field (going by the reviews at http://www.mmus.us/forum/showthread.php?s=0b874bdaeecf06cf07af2cf22d05865f&t=9203). The first one I've come across is called Anjuta, an IDE in linux. Though I dont use it much... its popular :D Hope someday I'll be able to join these guys. One thing has come for sure... you can't be good in open arena by using proprietary development platforms. If you wish to go open, stick to open platforms.

Quite a digression above... here's the process...
(I'll be posting link to threads from where I got download links. This, I believe, will also acknowledge the real people who work and post their finding in forums. Links may blank out with time, so i'll be including the logical progression too so that you can google the latest s/w)

1. Download RSD Lite - Motorola's flashing utility. I used the latest version posted here.
2. According to the user manual posted here, Motorola has stopped packaging USB drivers along with RSD Lite distributions. So, you can download the current latest (v3.8 AFAIK) here. The guy has posted it as v3.7 but its v3.8 :D
3. Before turning switching on the phone, press and hold * and # key and then turn on. It will show you your bootloader version. Now go to this page and download the corresponding 'no RSA' bootloader and its patch.
4. Time to decide on the firmware you want. Scan the web and choose one. I chose nikhil's and its downloadable from here.
5. Refer how-to for flashing here. It was quite easy and i dint need the tutorial. You'b be flashing in 3 steps - a. 'No RSA' bootloader', b. Patch for bootloader and c. new firmware.

There is tremendous amount of support on the forums mentioned here and for the errors you encounter, if any, a solution will already exist there. Better search in these forums if something goes wrong.

Well... a bit of looking around and i found the descriptive guide of above process here. A bit  too late for my benefit, but it may help someone else :)