Bye-bye Xiaomi Mi 3

Prelude

Last weekend was a long story, that I my Xiaomi Mi 3 is screwed! It happened like this.

I was in the car, using the phone to surf net and go through the social networks. Then suddenly, it popped up a notification saying that my phone is too hot, asked me to cool down, with a system button “Cool Down”. I cannot guarantee that this is not a virus, but I believe that my phone doesn’t have virus. (I can hardly find the Cool Down feature online, this is the only one.) So, I pressed the Cool Down button. With this press, sorry my phone. You got a stroke, and never overcome. Bye-bye!

Recovering

Because of that one press, my phone fell into the bootloop. When I went home, I searched for some possible solutions online. And found that, the possible solution is to flash the stock ROM. I downloaded everything I needed. Moreover, the most important thing is to get all my data especially photos, which I didn’t make any backup recently.

So, I followed the steps in this wonderful page for how to perform a flash. WARNING: This will flash everything, meaning, you will loss your data, including everything in the internal storage, such as photos. So, before I flash the stock ROM, I followed this forum to learn how to restore the data.

Summary:

  1. Get all the necessary drivers and software. Actually can be found in the official site. Important software are: MiFlash. It also requires drivers which can be found here. So that you can use “fastboot” command (and also “adb” command) and detect the phone when USB connected.
  2. Get the stock ROM and recovery ROM. I used TWRP.
  3. Boot into fastboot mode (read the instruction from the “wonderful page” mentioned above).
  4. Use command-line “fastboot” to flash the recovery ROM TWRP. And boot into the recovery mode.
  5. Once successfully boot, your computer can detect the phone (as MTP), then you can access the internal storage and copy all the files.

The luckiness within the unluckiness (不幸中的大幸), I managed to boot into recovery mode. Immediately copied everything from the phone to the computer. After this, I tried to flash the stock ROM. But failed. Tried various times, but none of them work. Even wanted to boot into the TWRP recovery mode was very difficult. But luckily, I got all the photos from the phone before these.

Searched for the solution again, I found this forum. Probably my battery got serious problem.

Yet, because my phone was bought through the mobile phone shop, not from Xiaomi official website. The phone is actually from Taiwan. And there is no nearest Xiaomi service centre at my area (and never will be). So, I can only say “bye-bye” to my phone. It is the time to “let it go”.

Epilogue

Most important thing is data. As long as you have the data, put it in any phone, then that is your phone. Just like your soul and spirit resides in any body, make it you yourself!

MIUI 7 Google Calendar sync problem

Recently, I found that, the calendar item (agenda) created in MIUI 7 Calendar does not sync to my Google Calendar. Then I ignore it.

And until today, I found that, the agenda from Google Calendar does not sync to MIUI7 Calendar too. Then this will be serious. So, I search around the forum, and finally get this solution.

Install Google Calendar! This will solve the calendar syncing problem. Enjoy!

MIUI upgrade

Today I just upgraded the MIUI to version 7. Actually, it prompted for the  upgrade since some times last week. But I failed to upgrade, expected to be server problem.

So, today I determined to find the solution for manual upgrade. The upgrade version is MIUI 7.0.5.0. I visited the official site and searched the ROM, but the official site does not have this ROM. As a result, just did a search, and found the target ROM in the MIUI official forum. Then everything becomes easy now.

In order to upgrade manually, we have to identify the filename of the target ROM. If we can start downloading the ROM file partially, then we can get the filename from the folder downloaded_rom.

Then to download using our desktop web browser such as Firefox, make a search online for the filename. For my case, it is “miui_MI3WMI4WGlobal_V7.0.5.0.KXDMICI_9830c22421_4.4.zip”. Make sure you are downloading from the official forum, where the file is located in the true MIUI server.

After download the ROM file, copy it to the downloaded_rom folder, run the system upgrade, then the phone will use the ROM directly. The phone skips the step downloading the ROM which may be very time exhaustive.

Finally, reboot, and upgrade success.

今天升级了MIUI 7。事实上,前几天(上个星期那样)就已经有提示让我升级了。不过试了很多次,都升级失败。应该是服务器的问题。

所以,今天我决定要手动升级。升级版本为MIUI 7.0.5.0。尝试了上官方网站找,但找不到这个ROM。结果,就上网搜寻,在官方讨论区找到。接下来就不是什么问题了。

首先,我们必须要知道ROM的文件名。这可以从downloaded_rom文件夹里看下载到一半的ROM。知道文件名之后,就可以用浏览器上网搜寻并下载。我所下载的是miui_MI3WMI4WGlobal_V7.0.5.0.KXDMICI_9830c22421_4.4.zip。为安全起见,所下载的文件应该是由官方讨论区而来,文件也应该是从MIUI的服务器下载。

下载完毕后,就复制到电话里的文件夹downloaded_rom。然后就来个系统升级。这个,就跳过了由电话下载ROM的步骤。

最后,重启,升级成功。