mxq pro 4k 5g allwinner h313 can't sd card boot

[Ducdanh Nguyen]

@AndroidNewbie Do you have the image of the box?

[Sergey Lepeshkin]

@AndroidNewbie, what kind of help do you expect to receive?

@Ducdanh Nguyen, are you sure it was my modified update.zip (hint: open it with any archiver and see for file "wipedata.flag" - is it there?)? Are old settings and apps stays in place after flashing? Are update.zip located in root of sd card? If all answers is yes, then try to update using usb flash drive instead of sd card.

[Ducdanh Nguyen]

@Sergey Lepeshkinok

[Octavio Cuatrochio]

Hey @Sergey Lepeshkin, your information proved very helpful! I have a tv box in the same vein as yours, but mine is version Z01S-V13.3, so they probably revised it a little bit.

Thanks for finding the UART pins! I will try it out and post what I find! My objective here is to overclock it, install active cooling and a heatsink, and see how it runs some emulators.

Btw, quick question, performance wise the box would be faster on Armbian or Android? Thanks!

[Octavio Cuatrochio]

Well, this version of the PCB seems the most locked up of all. I tried ADB with all USBs, no dice, no root, i soldered the wires to the UART test pins (See image below) but with my setup (also see image below) i could not get any logs via TIO in Linux.
Also, the toothpick method does not shows a menu, but goes straight to updating, so ALSO there is locked up, so i cannot go to recovery.
Any ideas? i'm pretty out of ideas at this point.

Are the wires badly soldered? both shows 3.3V, so i suppose not.
Is my USB-To-TTL badly configured?

Btw, my PCB is Z01S-v13.3, 2025.05.20.

Any help is appreciated.