Tuesday, September 19, 2017
Flashing a Global ROM onto the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 Pro Snapdragon 650
Flashing a Global ROM onto the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 Pro Snapdragon 650
During yesterdays trip to Stokenchurch to meet up with some fellow phone fanatics, I purchased a Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 Pro second hand off one of the guys at the meet. No doubt I will go into more details in a future post about the differences between this phone and the Mediatek (non-Pro) version, but in this post I will provided an overview of how I transitioned from the stock Chinese ROM to the Global ROM.
A similar procedure is likely needed for other Snapdragon SoC Xiaomi devices, although I have only tried the Redmi Note 3 Pro myself.
Preparation
We will need to download the following ROM images and tools before proceeding:
Chinese Developer ROM
MIUI Flashing tool
Redmi Note 3 Latest Qualcomm Global Stable (Fastboot ROM)
Unlocking tool
15 second adb installer (if adb and fastboot are not already installed on your PC)
Stage 1 - Changing from the Stable ROM to a Developer ROM
In order to unlock the bootloader on the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 Pro you need to be on the Developer firmware. This is unlike my experience with the Mediatek version, where an unlock could be performed from either ROM channel.
If you try to unlock the ROM from Stable, the unlock process will fail at 50% with the error message "Current account is different from the account info on the device"
Ensure you are running the latest version of the Stable Chinese ROM (check in the Updater app) and then flash the Developer ROM via the built in Updater app.
To do this, copy the zip file onto the device, run the Updater app, select the button at the top right and select "Chose Update Package". Select the zip file and off you go - you should have changed from the Stable channel to the Developer channel.
Stage 2 - Unlocking the bootloader
In a previous post I have gone into details of how to request a bootloader unlock from Xiaomi. If you have requested an unlock previously, you should already have the permissions on your Mi account to unlock the bootloader directly, but if not then it is worth checking this post.
Ensure that you are logged onto your Mi account in the phone, reboot into Fastboot mode (from device off, hold down power and volume down), run up the Unlocking tool MiFlashUnlock, sign in and go through the unlock procedure.
Stage 3 - Flashing the Global ROM
Once the bootloader is unlocked you can flash the Global ROM via the MiPhone flash tool. Once again, unlike the SP Flash tool used for Mediatek SoCs, with the Snapdragon SoC the bootloader must be unlocked before we can flash using this tool.
We need to unzip the tgz completely to get the extracted files and then use the MiFlash tool to flash the device. The tool is a little picky on the location of the files, so I put them in a folder off the root of the C drive.
It should be noted that fastboot and adb must be preinstalled for the tool to work - if required, download the 15 second adb installer above.
During the installation of the MiFlash tool, all sorts of weird instructions are given, mentioning a "Settings" application. I ignored all this, as there was no settings application installed & all went well without any further configuration.
To flash the Global ROM, the phone must be in Fastboot mode (Power and Vol down) and attached via USB to the PC. We must locate the unzipped global images folder using the Browse button (where the batch files are located) and then select refresh, which should pick up the device. Select "Flash all" as the flash option and then hit the Flash button.
Hopefully once everything has completed, the phone will boot up with the Global image, with all the Google services and a distinct lack of Chinese apps!
download file now
