[Xiaomi Mi A1 Questions & Answers] balannaer:
Alright. just to get this out of the way, I used to do tech support for HTC many moons ago. like back when they were *the* name in originating new tech to smart phones. I worked my ass off to get into the R&D team that handled all the new products that got released and to our product recovery team(the idiots that try to put a good light on a bad decision made by corporate). I have rooted and installed custom ROMS and recovery software on several phones from them as well as since then with the latest being my old galaxy S7 loaded up with TWRP and lineagoe OS(although i do not remember which version now)

But i did not do literally *ANY* of that with my Xiaomi MiA1. the phone functioned how i wanted it to out of the box and with the stock ROM, i had no need or desire to do anything with the ROM.

I have all but completely given up on doing this on my own now:mad:. I have gone over every guide on the MI forums for xiaomi and i think i may have even exhausted the ones that are available here now too. I am not sure WTH the problem at this point even is :confused: but here is the lowdown:

:fingers-crossed:

got the update near the end of December/beginning of January to update my MI A1 to the new android pie version that just came out OTA(i actually have two of these phones, one i have not updated since the first update to oreo, and this one that is hardbricked from after the PIE update)

At first when i got the OTA update, my phone started to act sluggish. simple apps like messenger, or google drive that had always worked flawlessly suddenly were taking ages to load. So like any sensible person, i pulled my info to my SD card, took it out, and then did a system recovery to restore factory defaults and start with a fresh OS again, just like when windows starts behaving poorly.

only this did not fix the problem. It persisted with poor performance after the factory data reset and upon my next reboot, my phone just stopped loading when it got to the MI logo on the screen. i literally let the phone sit on this screen overnight thinking just maybe it was being slow to boot after the reset. No luck and in the morning it remained at this screen.

just to make a note:

-phone was purchased off of amazon, i have reached out to the seller(it was a business)

-phone is in CANADA, so there are no service centers

-i CANNOT enter recovery mode(pwr + volup + voldn), it just freezes at the mi screen

-i CAN enter fastboot, but cannot flash room

-bootloader is locked and i have not yet found a method that will successfully unlock it

-the miflash tool does not work(on any version what-so-ever)

-the mi unlock tool gets to 50% and then fails, cannot unlock

-i have installed minimal adb for fastboot, none of the related commands succeed(yes system sees the phone:

c:\adb>fastboot devices

91c0963c0804 fastboot)

-i cannot unlock bootloader here and cannot install twrp or any other recovery image and it will not allow it even temporarily

I've gotten desperate enough to have even gone to the extreme and tried EDL mode by using test point to enter, computer recognizes the device even as the qualcom 9008, still no luck with any of the tools or ROMs provided on Xiaomi's website.

So be real with me here ladies and gents.... should i take this thing on my next trip up a telecomm tower and biff it as hard as i can at the ground(obviously in a snowless area for the most satisfaction) or can you saintly people actually offer me some support on this to turn my brick paperweight back into a phone again?

it is also worth mentioning that this is my first post here because i have never before had a problem with following any of he guides on here to accomplish any task i've ever set out to do with an android device, but this beastly lil mother is seriously making me consider becoming an iphone person(not really but do you get the frustration here?)

I'm writing this at 5:30 in the morning after being up all night working on this task so if my info is missing somewhere along the line just poke me with stick and i will fill in the blanks as needed.

I couldn't be bothered to get and load screenshots tonight but i will get some up tomorrow after sleep, for now i am going to the graveyard to rest.

Thanks for any responses in advance here.