Installed a standard Motorola update on the phone yesterday only to find it stuck on the boot screen for over an hour. Several reboots and cache wipes later I knew this was going to need a bit more serious attention as the phone was bricked as they say.
I decided I might as well try Cyanogenmod as they normally do a great job. None of their Android 5 versions for the Moto G seemed to be available so I went with the latest and greatest Android 6. Firstly though I was having trouble with even connecting properly to the phone. Eventually I flashed Cyanogenmod’s recovery then adb sideloaded the cm13 zip onto the phone and it actually worked and I had a workable phone. Of course then I realized I was missing all the google apps as they need to be installed seperately and an android phone without google apps ain’t much use.
So now that I had a workable phone I was able to use the adb push command to easily transfer files from the laptop onto the phone. I got the latest googleapps via OpenGapps and tried to install but it failed. Cue frantic googling which didn’t reveal too much. Tried variations of the gapps, tried wiping phones cache and even tried reinstalling cyanogenmod all to no avail. Finally another bit of googling suggested that OpenGapps worked best with the TeamWin recovery tool rather than the CM one I had. So back to bootloader, fastboot flash the twrp image (once I found the right version for the moto g 4g), wipe all the data again, install CM13 and OpenGapps together and success. Woohoo. One reboot later and I had a snazzy new Android 6 version of my Moto G.