I have the same problem and tried these same steps. The issue seems to be that no flashing or bootup is occurring. The front panel light is flashing intermittently, but that is the only activity in the Ultimo 4K unit. Tried with HDD disconnected, and nothing is working including the front panel which is always blank. Only sign of life is front panel light flashing. I suspect the flash memory is corrupt / stuck before box can get to initial boot sequence to even turn on the front LCD and offer the option to flash image as it seems flashing will not start with a blank front LCD screen. I've tried many different USB sticks, with FAT32 formatted sticks, and with larger capacity exFAT formats. The exFAT did work to install Black Hole image, which during channel scan found a list of channels same as any old cable box from the cable tuner (no SATs attached to the SAT tuners), but for some reason, the channels would remain blank. Because of this, I tried to download a bunch of extensions/plugins for softcams etc but nothing helped. At some point, the box offered an option to use old image (on HDD presumably) and I chose: No. After turning off box, it would never boot again, no signs of life other than flashing front circular power light, and no response of any kind, no HDD spinning etc. and there was no flashing activity anymore after trying to flash images, bootloaders etc.
I'm at a total loss what to do as Vu+ website offers no hardware support or customer service, and this was the only thread I could find from several hours of "googling". If anyone can help here, in any way, I'd appreciate it very much, in order to try to revive or repair this "bricked" Vu+ Ultimo 4K box.
