[General Questions and Answers] tusch00101:
My solution to Sahara / Download fail with QFIL

I started rooting 4 weeks ago and failed several times. I spent hours and finally gave up. Today I started again, and after about 6 hours I got my problem solved.

Since in between I have done a clean windows setup, wiping countless times cache and data partitions I can give you some idears where to look for trouble-shooting. Hope that will help you:

1. For me the QFIL-File provided by cesarq in Post #163 didn't do the trick.

First I got a warning about a missing dll (although I had installed MS Visual C++ 2008 / 2015 / 2017)

--> I downloaded from the web QPST 2.7.460 (yes, there are many bad versions, no guarantee). I got QPST from Android MTK here: https://androidmtk.com/download-qpst-flash-tool. Worked for me. It's a complete installer - and it asked me to download the missing MS Visual C++ (??? not that I had it installed), that from 2010. That took care of the missing dll- Message.

I did that four weeks ago and could not resolve some of the issues. I did several additional measures in between / since then:

2. At some time I couldn't even find my phone in QFIL, in windows device manager there were different drivers installed, so I got rid of every driver that was connected to any mobile phone. It worked for recognition, but somehow I still got the error with Sahara fail. After reading the web I got so frustrated and did nothig for 4 weeks.

But I also did a new windows setup (unrelated), so today I had a clean system and let windows download the qualcomm driver from the net for the phone. That was an additional bonus. I don't think that was the fix.

3. (credit to somebody on the web, I don't find the link any more)

What did finally help was to move all the files for flashing to a subfolder in the QPST-Program directory in Windows (in Windows 7 it's C:\Program Files (x86)\QPST). Both the complete firmware (cesarqs Post #165) and the modified update.zip-Files from OpenMinded (Post #227).

For clarification:

My cats60files (prog_emmc_firehose_8952_ddr.mbn, rawprogram0.xml, ...) are in: C:\Program Files (x86)\QPST\extracted_cats60files

My complete firmware is in C:\Program Files (x86)\QPST\firmware

remark: maybe it is just sufficient add the current folder with the flash-files to your path-environment-variable in windows - I haven't tested it: set path=%path%;drive:\path\to\your\QFIL-programme-directory\;

With this I managed to run QFIL successfully.:good:

My rooting-procedure was that from aym21 (Post #239). My biggest problem this time was to get the phone to the download mode. I still haven't figured out when to press which button how long or when to use the pin for 10 s w/o cable connected. Everytime it booted in the clean setup, I authorized the phone in the developers menu and used adb reboot recovery to do a wipe of cache / data again. That was most likely overkill but with reading about all the problems I decided that I rather err on the save side. At least my phone never hung, and it never took longer than one to two minutes to boot. Just wait a bit.

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Maybe these instructions help solving your issues. If you encouter still some problems, this time I have written down every step I did, just to make sure, I can reproduce it in case I need it. What I can't do is help with any programming, I have no idea what I just did. It just got my phone rooted.

Good Luck