Your Pic 3 shows, as you said, no "Initializing Network..." message. This means something is hanging during boot preventing the networking subsystem from loading and thus it won't be seen in MAX. This, at least, gives us a partial picture of what's going on.
I'm interested/concerned about the problem you're seeing in Pic 4 - this might be the cause of all the problems you're having. If the software didn't fully get installed because of some problem, this could partially cause the hang you're seeing. The error you're seeing (due to password issues) is generally only seen when you change the FTP password (by locking the system via MAX), or changing the system's Administrator password from within MAX or Web Services. Assuming you didn't do either of those the problem may be with erroneously reading information on the disk, making the system think you did one of those things. There are a couple possible scenarios:
- Your disk may have bad sectors that are being used. RT's format and partitioning mechanisms do not check for bad sectors nor can it mark bad sectors. You will need to use a DOS utility on the drive to check for bad sectors and mark them as unusable. I personally like using FreeDOS, and you can create a USB Bootable FreeDOS thumbdrive.
- The disk partition may have become partially corrupt. Boot off the USB RT PC Desktop Utilities thumbdrive, select Option 6 "Format Options", and select Option 2 to wipe out all partition information on the disk and create a single partition. Select a Reliance partition in the next menu. Once formatted, remove the USB thumbdrive from the system and reboot the computer. Keep the thumbdrive in your pocket (or in a desk drawer) from that point on. When the system reboots, it should boot into Safe Mode from the hard drive and then you can install software. (Reliance was chosen because the reliance formatter does a better job of checking for disk irregularities than the FAT formatter. Reliance is also a better filesystem for insulating other files when there's a problem with file instability (because of power-off situations). However, you cannot read a Reliance partition using Windows or DOS so be aware of this.
- Your hard drive may not be set up as Primary Master - your disk must be set up as a Primary Master boot drive.
The boot mechanisms used to boot Safe Mode from the USB thumbdrive and booting Safe Mode or RT off the hard disk are two completely different animals, and must be treated as such. Hopefully we can get rid of the error you're seeing in MAX so we can be assured the installation on the disk is good.
Something else to try is to enable debug printing of the network initialization. We actually initialize the network devices prior to printing out the "Initializing Network..." message, and it's possible that the network drivers on your USB thumbdrive are newer than the ones being installed onto the hard disk for run mode. Boot up into Safe Mode on your USB thumbdrive and FTP to the target and modify the ni-rt.ini file to include the following lines at the END of the file:
[Debug]
TraceEthernetDriverLoading=TRUE
This will cause prints to show the ethernet driver load status. Take a picture of where the hang occurs, if anything changes.
This is all I have for now. Let's see if any of these give us something we can use.
-Danny
