When I first upgraded my new Vera Plus, it seemed to somehow corrupt the overlay partition on the upgrade attempt, and fail, and then subsequent reboots left the upgrade script thinking an upgrade was in progress and needed to be finished, but the overlay partition wasn’t properly written, so it could never get past that point. My system had the power light on and nothing else. It would occasionally blink as the device periodically rebooted, but never came fully up.
In my case, I was still able to SSH into the box and look around; its network, DHCP client, and SSH server services were operating. Once in, I could see it was in OpenWRT’s “failsafe” mode trying to complete the upgrade. I found the upgrade log showing the error, repeating messages about attempting to mount the overlay partition, in a file called /tmp/log.mios_firmware. I could see in that file that it was waiting for the filesystem to come ready, but it never did, and never would/could. The messages mentioned the block device name, in my case /dev/mtdblock9, so having some experience with OpenWRT and being totally unafraid of voiding warranties, I ran jffs2reset on that block device, then rebooted. My Vera came up after about 8 minutes. Later, I found reference in older threads in this forum mentioning users being directed to use “flash_eraseall -j /dev/mtdx” (where x is the partition number of the /overlay partition). This would have a similar effect: it erases the filesystem. Oh, and this has to be done fairly quickly, because Vera’s upgrade script eventually times-out trying and reboots the Vera to try again, throwing you off in the process, so you have to get all of this done inside of one attempt of that script… 5 or so minutes. Or, you can use ps to find the upgrade script running and kill it, then take your time.
Not saying anyone should do this. Vera support may direct you to do this, or something similar. A lot of different problems can look the same on the lights, but need different steps to cure them, so this may not be the cure for you. Vera support knows best, and if goes completely wrong, it’s on them. At that time, I was just starting a complete rebuild (clean slate, no backup restore–leave my problems behind) of my network to upgrade from a Vera3 to a Plus, and was already PO’d about the amount of work that would take, and having to buy a new device with no assurance that the problems I was having on the Vera3 would be resolved, and then completely out of my mind when the thing appeared to brick itself on the upgrade attempt right from step one. And then two days went by with no reply from Vera support. So I was red-faced and fully ready to just throw Vera in the dumper anyway. I had nothing to lose but my $99 (actually, I was still in the return window with Amazon, so I could have even decided to take that route if it hadn’t worked; yes, I was thinking like a bad person in the moment, don’t judge me ).