[Q] How should I go about unbricking my friends phone? topic

Hello, my friend has a Ace 2 (GT-I8160) and he wanted me to try and install CM 11 on his phone. I managed to root it and install temporary CWM on it, however his version of CWM could not flash CM 11 ROM's because it was outdated. I Googled around and found a TWRP .img file that I decided to flash via ODIN (CWM couldn't flash any TWRP .zip files for some reason). Everything went perfectly fine with ODIN, however my friends phone could not go pass the Samsung logo, it would appear for a few seconds and then the screen would go black. He also couldn't go into recovery but he could go into Download mode. Thinking that it was a recovery problem, I managed to get a .img file of TWRP 2.8.6.0 by Chronomonochrome and flash that via ODIN. Still the same problem - phone won't go pass the logo, however it can go into recovery.

So, now the phone boots perfectly to Download mode and recovery - and it can do everything from the recovery, like making backups, wiping, etc, but it cannot boot to the OS itself. I still haven't flashed a custom ROM on his phone because he didn't have the ROM file on his phone at the time nor could be transfer it to his phone via his PC because of some driver issue.

I'm currently downloading I8160XXBN1 firmware from Samsung Updates to flash via ODIN and try to get his phone back into working state. However, I also planned on placing my SD Card (which has the CM rom and Gapps on it) into his phone and flashing a new, custom ROM instead of flashing the firmware.

Does anyone have any advice on what I should do? Should I flash official firmware via ODIN or just flash the ROM using the recovery?

Thanks in advance.