the seller sent me the exact file posted here back a page or two by a member let me post the link to the original post. if you can help in any way that would be amazing. here i thought the seller was sending me actual legit firmware and i had no idea till after it screwed my unit and googling that it was the same file posted here. he then tried to tell me he got it right from hantek so it should work and then i never heard from him again.
Not claiming it's the case here, but it's not at all unusual for sellers, or even a manufacturer's level 1 customer service, to not realize that a given firmware isn't compatible with all versions of hardware. Hardware occasionally goes through revisions that require different firmware codebases. This seemed to become much more common over the past few years of supply chain challenges, where manufacturers had to change components due to availability issues, which often required new firmware. With some vendors, firmware version 1.x only works with the original design, while 2.x only works with design #2, 3.x only works with design #3, and so on.
For a recent example, you can check the threads here on the Uni-T UTi260B/690B thermal cameras. They are the same design but the UTi690B was commissioned for sale exclusively by Banggood, as a private-label model, and they are the support provider for that model (you won't find it on Uni-T's website). I have the UTi690B model and had a YouTuber send me the firmware update he received from Banggood that worked for his UTi690B.
It bricked mine. So I contacted Banggood to see if they could help, and promptly send me the exact same firmware image that bricked my unit. Mine was a 1.x.x.x firmware model, and the version they're sending out to customers is 2.x.x.x. As I and others in that thread experienced, trying to flash a 2.x firmware to a 1.x unit renders it unbootable. Thanks to others in those threads, I was able to recover by opening it up and accessing the LVTTL UART pins to get a console shell that allowed me to manually copy back a 1.x firmware image. I let Banggood know that they were responsible for bricking 1.x customers units with this firmware, and they seemed surprised, saying that they'd be taking it up with Uni-T. I haven't heard back from them since.