My friend came to me with his Xiaomi Mi Note that he was planning to sell, but was unable to reset through the menus. I managed to reset it with fastboot -w whilst holding I think ‘Volume down’ and the ‘Power button’ from a cold boot.

Using android-sdk-platform-tools /opt/android-sdk/platform-tools/fastboot on Archlinux. Here’s the log:

~$ fastboot -w
< waiting for any device >
Creating filesystem with parameters:
	Size: 60121133056
	Block size: 4096
	Blocks per group: 32768
	Inodes per group: 8192
	Inode size: 256
	Journal blocks: 32768
	Label:
	Blocks: 14678011
	Block groups: 448
	Reserved block group size: 1024
Created filesystem with 11/3670016 inodes and 276420/14678011 blocks
target reported max download size of 1610612736 bytes
Creating filesystem with parameters:
	Size: 402653184
	Block size: 4096
	Blocks per group: 32768
	Inodes per group: 8192
	Inode size: 256
	Journal blocks: 1536
	Label:
	Blocks: 98304
	Block groups: 3
	Reserved block group size: 23
Created filesystem with 11/24576 inodes and 3131/98304 blocks
erasing 'userdata'...
OKAY [ 24.552s]
sending 'userdata' (141083 KB)...
OKAY [  4.419s]
writing 'userdata'...
OKAY [  2.585s]
erasing 'cache'...
OKAY [  0.040s]
sending 'cache' (8336 KB)...
OKAY [  0.263s]
writing 'cache'...
OKAY [  0.139s]
finished. total time: 31.999s
~$ fastboot continue
resuming boot...
OKAY [  0.000s]
finished. total time: 0.000s
~$