Interesting how this played out. I did reach out to support@3duniverse and received zero response, kind of disappointed,
As mentioned above I had powered off the printer waited a few minutes and restarted with the same result. So I ordered the cable anyway. However yesterday eve, I tried one more time and this time unplugged the printer and left alone for at least 15 mins. This time it rebooted as expected :-) Just to be safe I did a firmware re-install and watched it start to finish. All is fine now. I think the lesson learned for me is to never perform a firmware update unattended. And be very generous with the unplug time as mentioned above.
thank you all
Jim