I’ve certainly not seen anything like that before. I just booted up a V3 [WiFi LoRa 32] board [under the Adruino IDE] to check the normal message sequence and ESP-ROM:esp32s doesn’t show up anywhere. Unfortunately, however, Heltec has form when it comes to making significant [hardware] changes between minor revisions of boards, so my experience might be irrelevant when dealing with a V3.2 board.
Are you using the Arduino IDE or one of the other development platforms?
Either way, and this is a real long shot, but some of us had a problem a little while back getting CubeCell boards to boot/load. In the end, we had to follow the sequence suggested by @bns but keep the PRG button pressed throughout the load sequence, or at least until the load sequence had commenced. In the case of my ‘problem board’ this is an intermittent problem—sometimes it boots/loads as you’d expect, other times not.
On the cable front, as I recall, if you’re seeing messages, even if you don’t like the ones you’re seeing, on the Serial Monitor, the cable should be OK.
Beyond all that, if I had to guess at what might be going on, I’d say it looks like the board has correctly identified what it needs to start the boot cycle, i.e. it’s working with an ESP32-S boot ROM, but it can’t find what it needs after that, for whatever reason. You say that output pauses when you follow the PRG/BOOT button sequence, if you keep the PRG button pressed, does the output stop? And then does this provide any opportunity to provide input?
If the board still won’t cooperate after all that, we might be needing @ashley, or whoever it is from Heltec who is monitoring this forum these days, to offer some comment.
All of this, of course, assumes that there’s nothing unusual going on as a result of some ‘reseller’ arrangement between Heltec and DollaTek (based on the link you provided above) and that the board you are using is indeed identical to those shipped directly by Heltec.
