I finally got the 286D modem to flash, on a fresh laptop with fresh Win7 install, which was a PITA in 2022. But anyway, that qtools incantations were the key, SB3.0 is now going on. BTW. I noticed that it is possible to skip certain partitions, most notably EFS, when you select "Edit". Also, I think I know what failed before. To run qtools, QPST MUST be closed, otherwise it will occupy the serial port, and this is what qtools were complaining about, after all.
But this is still to no avail. After flashing, the modem seems to behave exactly the same as previously. I suspect that charge pump in NAND flash went bust, and thus the memory went read-only ;_;
I've had this happen on a totally different device in the past ;-)
At least by using qtools, I can try dumping the flash contents now.
@stich86, where did you get your qtools build? I'm looking for possibly newer one - one on github lacks the chipset support I need - -k12 is invalid chipset code - I wanted to recompile them under Linux.
Edit, nevermind: found this in that fork: https://github.com/Maks-2012/qtools