[Redmi Note 12 4G] fruit_against_teeth:
Yesterday I spent another 4 hours after work, achieved very little but learning a few things:

I started the session by reading up about anti rollback protection and using

fastboot getvar anti

to check if it is active on my phone. It returned anti: 1 so I knew it was something that does in general affect me. But the forums also said that it's not really a problem if you flash other ROMs but only if you try to flash older Xiaomi ROMs. So I basically put it in the back of my mind for later.

I then moved on to installing OrangeFox. It really was as easy as downloading it (https://orangefox.download/de-DE/release/65cb9f68a53316f6742da34e/buildnotes), copying the IMG file into the the android tools folder, starting cmd and navigating into the correct folder, and then following the steps described on the download page:

fastboot flash recovery recovery.img (flashing OrangeFox onto the recovery partition) followed by

fastboot reboot recovery (booting up from the recovery)

A little sidenote here: From the first time I had the phone I struggled entering fastboot. It only worked like every 10th time and I couldn't figure out why. Eventually I got mad and googled it and after reading a few related things I realized that I held the power button for too long. Everywhere you read to press and hold volume down and power at the same time. So I did that until the phone buzzed and then would stop pressing both buttons. Turns out you have to let go of the power button before it buzzes (without getting any hint whatsoever that your phone actually does anything) while keeping the volume down button pressed. I find that very unintuitive...

Back to the main story:

Once you're in OrangeFox you have to enter your android passkey to enable OrangeFox to read the encrypted partition. At the same time your phone also appears in Windows again so that you're able to move files back and forth. I then made a full backup to my brand new SD card. You cannot put the backup of your drive onto that drive so I was glad I had bought the SD card back when I bought the phone. There is however an option to backup directly to a connected USB device but I didn't try that.

Once the backup was done I copied both the PixelExperience preflash and image onto my SD card (both downloaded from the thread in this forum: https://xdaforums.com/t/shared-unof...e-normal-plus-android-13-tapas-topaz.4605985/). OrangeFox only recognizes compressed archives as flashable files. If you decompress it into a folder or try to directly use e.g. payload.bin, it won't show you the dialogue for flashing. I then put both the preflash and the image into the flash queue, activating the "reflashing OrangeFox afterwards" for both.

I then started the process and waited until it was finished. When it was done I pressed reboot on the screen and the phone did a few things until I ended up in fastboot again. Also forcing a restart didn't change that. By now it was around 10pm and had it for the day. I tried once again to flash the current HyperOS EU ROM using MIFlash which once again didn't work and then downloaded the latest HyperOS global ROM which MiFlash installed without any problems (using the delete and flash option) and the phone automatically restarted once the process was done and booted up android 14 for the first time. I shut off the device and called it a day.

I still don't know what the preflash is supposed to to and why it is necessary. I also don't know why it didn't work but it was too late to go for another round.

While writing this post I realized that I skipped a step in the OrangeFox build installation: It says in the build notes that you should flash the OrangeFox ZIP again after you first boot it up. I must have overlooked that part when I read the notes yesterday. So it well could be the reason the whole didn't work...

Another thing I don't really get is why I cannot put the Xiaomi EU ROM onto my device. It's like the phone itself rejects it. I would assume it is some safeguard so that people won't buy cheap phones designated for the chinese market, reflash them for EU and sell them here. Then again: It's basically what happened to me. If you think about it, I kinda got scammed on this device: I bought it via Amazon Germany, expecting to get an EU device, instead I got a non-NFC phone that will only accept global ROMs. Even before I unlocked the bootloader, a lot of somewhat important use cases would have been impossible due to the lack of NFC and the device being an international version with probably limited access to european-only apps.