Flashing Xiaomi.eu Stable 8.1.2.0 Via Updater App Relocked Bootloader, Please Help!

[Jaime DLH]

Hi all, just a while ago, I flashed Stable 8.1.2.0 xiaomi.eu on my Redmi 3S. The updater rebooted into TWRP, ran the update script, and then rebooted. The MI logo flashed briefly, then... a blank screen. Nothing else, for 10 minutes. I tried to reboot the phone holding the power button, and again, just the MI logo for a brief while and then a black screen.

Rebooting into TWRP recovery didn't work, but I could reboot into fastboot. Tried to reflash TWRP, but got this:

> fastboot flash recovery twrp.img
target reported max download size of 536870912 bytes
sending 'recovery' (29384 KB)...
OKAY [ 1.076s]
writing 'recovery'...
FAILED (remote: Partition flashing is not allowed)
finished. total time: 1.089s

Then, I ran fastboot oem device-info and found this:

> fastboot oem device-info
...
(bootloader) Device tampered: false
(bootloader) Device unlocked: false
(bootloader) Device critical unlocked: false
(bootloader) Charger screen enabled: true
(bootloader) Display panel:
OKAY [ 0.021s]
finished. total time: 0.023s

My bootloader got relocked!

I can enter fastboot, so I'm trying to unlock the bootloader (even though this means I will lose all data on the phone - argh)... Why did this happen? Obviously the phone was unlocked to begin with...

 

[Jaime DLH]

Update 1: I just ran the MiFlashUnlock tool, it unlocked the phone correctly. But now, upon booting into the OS, the phone shows a screen asking to enter a password, and the phone PIN nor the MI account passwords are working! Please, any help is appreciated!

 

[Jaime DLH]

Update 2: This is getting weirder by the minute. It seems my data/internal storage is encrypted! (that's why upon boot it asked me for a password - which I don't have...)

My recovery got overwritten with the stock one, so I reflashed TWRP, and it asks me for a password to decrypt data... Don't know why this happened.

Now I'm very wary to try and flash this version again... What should I do? Go back to 8.0.10.0?

 

[Jaime DLH]

Finally, I had to do the following steps to get my Redmi 3S back to working order:

- Unlock bootloader with MiFlashUnlock
- Flash TWRP and boot into it (to get rid ot storage encryption)
- Format data partition
- Install xiaomi.eu 8.0.10.0 Stable with TWRP

The two main problems found, which required to perform the above steps, were:

- Xiaomi.eu 8.1.2.0 Stable Installation process somehow relocked my (previously unlocked) bootloader
- Both the firmware and TWRP seemed to think the storage was encrypted after flashing, and asked for a password. Neither the phone PIN nor the MI account password worked for this.

At least one user reported success when installing 8.1.2.0 from TWRP, so it might be an error related to using the updater app (does anyone know if there are differences when installing via updater app, as opposed to installing directly from TWRP?). Perhaps anyone from the dev team could shed some light into this?

 

[MarkyO]

I successfully flashed 8.1.2 over 8.1.1 through TWRP without any issues. On my device 8.1.2 runs fine.

 

[Jaime DLH]

Thank you @MarkyO . With you, three users reported success when flashing from TWRP. None used the updater app.

 

[Jaime DLH]

Update 3: I've just flashed from TWRP, it worked just fine. I'm now on 8.1.2.0, no problems at all.

Good thing it worked, but if anyone can look at the issue anyway, it would be great... Does anyone have any clue as to how it could relock the bootloader? It makes no sense to me... Why the very same file (xiaomi.eu_multi_HM3SHM3X_V8.1.2.0.MALCNDI_v8-6.0.zip, MD5: 649bf64c297c78983acb8e164d13a529, file size: 880,099,081 bytes) works just fine from TWRP but causes such spectacular errors through the updater app, even though it just calls an update script which is run by TWRP anyway??

Thanks a lot to everyone who provided feedback on this and other threads!