There are many many online blogs and forums which discuss the methods for unlocking the bootloader of Redmi Note 3. I had been using the device for a while now.
After the marshmallow upgrade, i started finding many bugs though, issues with headphone mic, non identification of fingerprints. I decided to give Lineage OS (https://download.lineageos.org) a try !
So i started the search on unlocking the BL. Believe me, its really frustrating !!
Let me put forward the steps you will need to do to unlock the BL.
- First you will need the official permission to unlock the BL. Apply it here : http://en.miui.com/unlock/
- Sign in using your Mi account and give valid reasons on why you want to unlock the bootloader. Just be honest here. I mentioned the fact about the bugs in the upgrade and hence i wanted to try custom roms. I had to wait for 3 days before my application was accepted. You will receive an SMS to your mobile number confirming that you have received the permission to unlock the BL.
- Now comes the real headache 😀
Once the above steps are done, download the MI flash unlock tool from http://en.miui.com/unlock/download_en.html
# Open the Mi unlock tool which looks like :
# Go ahead and agree the conditions and login with your Mi account.
# After logging in, you will see something like :
# Do as per the instruction there, power off the phone and power on by pressing the volume down and power button, which will take you to fastboot mode.
# Once you see the phone as connected, just press unlock and wait for the process to complete.
Hey, but wait, did it get stuck at 50 % ? with the error ? “Couldn’t verify device”
There are many many solutions for this error you will find in the online forums.
I tried almost everything. Some of them are :
## Login to MI cloud (https://i.mi.com/) and see if there are any duplicate devices seen as online, other than the phone which you are going to unlock BL ( For me nothing else was there)
## Try this on the Developer ROM ( http://en.miui.com/download-301.html ) – No luck for me
## Try from Alternate PC for unlocking ! ( Tried that too, nothing works)
After getting fedup, i decided to contact the MI live Chat support to know what their feedback was. I had a chat with three different agents and three of them had 3 different solutions 😀
# Miss Shankunthala ( names have been changed ) told me a pretty funny reason. Mi took away the option to unlock BL for Indian customers, citing security reasons 😛 So for indians, its kind of banned and if i really need to unlock, i would need to visit the local service center. On asking whats special at a service center, she replied, they have a special USB cable to unlock this. I almost fainted ( I have the chat saved with me 🙂
# The other two agents told me , to reapply for permission. But if you once applied for permission, you will not even see an option to request again. These guys were asking me to do something which isn’t there in the first place.
By this time, i felt insane for the replies i got. I flashed the Stable ROM back and was waiting to see how to get this done.
I decided to wait for few days before trying again. Waited for 3 days and gave it a try and hurraaaaay !! no error this time at 50%, it got completed. Really not sure on what is the real issue, the support at Mi isn’t ready to disclose this yet. May be I had to wait 3 days for my data to get propagated at Mi unlock servers 😛