An adventure in flashing a European ROM on an Indian POCO F5 phone to try and enable NFC

I purchased a Poco F5 5G in India at the beginning of 2025, and was surprised to see Google Wallet reporting that 'Tap' is not available on this device. There is no NFC toggle in the settings. This phone has NFC in all other countries. 

After some Googling, it seems that NFC hardware is either missing or software disabled in India. Some have enabled NFC by flashing the ROM with a global version, others have not been successful. I am sceptical, but I will give it a try.

1. Settings, About phone, OS version, tap 7 times to enable developer mode.

2. Enable USB debugging

3. Unlock bootloader. Needs a SIM.

4. adb.exe devices and accept connection on the phone screen

5. adb.exe shell reboot bootloader

6. fastboot.exe oem unlock (token verify fails)

7. Two-step extraction of marble_global_images_OS1.0.12.0.UMRMIXM_20241107.0000.00_14.0_global_a15f262d18.tgz

8. Copy the address of marble_global_images_OS1.0.12.0.UMRMIXM_20241107.0000.00_14.0_global_a15f262d18\marble_global_images_OS1.0.12.0.UMRMIXM_14.0 into the address bar area of the MiFlash tool.  Refresh leads to an unhandled exception.  Fix by following https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaSCVJ3VrmY and try again.

9. Error  

10. Need to https://en.miui.com/unlock/download_en.html