Hi everyone, I gave my beloved Redmi Note 8 Pro to my kid and purchased for Christmas 2022 a Note 13 Pro Global ROM on ebay, the model 2312DRA50C supports 5G and goes by “garnet”, but when I put a SMARTY SIM from a different phone (Mi 10T Lite) in it then all kind of issues started. SMARTY support asked to activate VoLTE setting and there was none and the code I found did not work; so I decided to upgrade to the latest firmware and Android 15.

Flashing HyperOS 2.0 “garnet\_global\_images\_OS2.0.6.0.VNRMIXM\_15.0” was straight forward and looked nice but there was no mobile network available. Apparently, there is an incompatibility issue with the modem.img for the Chinese version of this model. Then I decided to flash the previous firmware 2.0.4 and made a fatal mistake by forgetting to leave the bootloader unlocked. Apparently, Xiaomi has an anti roll back protection in place bricking (bootloop) the phone intentionally.

The phone booted into recovery mode (Chinese language) and is after trying the official Xiaomi unlock tool stuck in Fastboot mode. Xiaomi refuses to unlock the phone for the reason “The place where the account is registered does not match the place where the phone is sold.” No advice given on how to resolve the issue.

There must be a way to get the boot loader unlocked but three phone repair shops in Edinburgh (UK) were unable to do it already. It transpires that it is extremely difficult to get in contact with this Chinese company. If I have to write the phone off, my next one will be a Motorola.