PANIC!!!

I couldn't just leave it alone...
Let me start from the beginning.

I have been wanting to install CyanogenMod on my Nexus 10 for awhile. It seemed simple enough, I already had Clockworks Recovery mod installed from when I rooted the device. Instructions all read and all I had to do was flash the ROM. Well here's the tricky thing. Even though I have the latest version of CWM when I went to flash the ROM it gives me a status 7 error and doesn't really inform me what that is. A little googling reveals that it is some sort of verification error and all I have to do is modify a couple files on the ROM zip.

I restart my nexus and this is where the trouble really starts. Its stuck in a recovery loop. Every time I try to reboot the device it boots up CWM.
Bootloader is saying "Reboot Mode Flag: Recovery" so I figure that's what's doing it, all I need to do is change that back to none or normal and it will boot fine. Well apparently there is no simple way to change that flag for the nexus 10 that I could find on the internet. There were plenty of people giving solutions for nexus7 and the s3, but none for my tablet.

To make matters worse, I can't access the tablet through USB on computer. This is when I start to panic and yell at myself. After 10 minutes of that (without touching device, I know not to do anything while panicking) I recall that the nexus root toolkit boots directly into cwm, so there must be a way for it to reset the flag once its done doing whatever it is it does. I connect the nexus to the computer once again and the program is detecting it. I run a couple access tests on it which all return with positive results. During the second test I notice that the bootloader flag is back to none. Yay problem fixed, nope.

The nexus boots up and I get the nexus loading screen with 4 circles, and then black. Reboots back to cwm. At this point I'm thinking the operating system must have got corrupted when it gave me a status 7 error, even though I can find no other examples of this on the internet. I mean status 7 is a verification check before it actually does anything. One more thing I am comfortable trying, and that's a full factory reset. I restart into bootloader and start up nexus root toolkit again. I next run the flash stock + unroot tool and it does its thing.

5 minutes later I am running a fully wiped unrooted locked nexus with stock 4.4.2 AOSP. I quickly unlock and root the device, then install twrp. Within 5 minutes I am running cyanogenmod. So what'd I do wrong? Well. Nothing. Apparently theres a fault in CWM that occasionally ROMs fail the verification check for no reason, and there's another fault that CWM can occasionally get caught in a recovery bootloop. My bad luck to have got them both at the same time.

Now I need to mention that they say they have fixed these problems in the latest version of the mod. THEY HAVE NOT as I was using the latest version downloaded through their own manager. If you need custom recovery, use twrp instead.