so, the windows flasher i tried needs a .pac file for the phone . it needs two partitions from it, and won't do much of anything without them, including apparently downloading data from the phone. i'm not sure where to find this factory image for this phone, but could look more places.
another thing i found is that there are of course a handful of hardware dongles for working with this chipset and phones directly. this idea is inspiring. if the dongle approach works, then i might be able to bypass any lock restrictions on the device by simply treating it as a new device i am building. it looks like the partitions it needs, fd1 and fd2, may simply be the user and system partitions. i found a janky instruction guide for generating a .pac file from backup images of a rooted phone. they actually use the windows flasher tool, to pack the files into a .pac file.
