I am seeing the exact same problem, where after the installation and a reboot, the system just hangs at the line after statd with a blinking cursor.
I breifly installed pluto on this machine a week or so ago as a dedicated core, but reinstalled it today given that I added a few extra drives to the raid array as well as some extra hardware including two DVB cards and a second ethernet card.
Another thing to note is that during the install it detected the dlink pci network card I added (connected to a cable modem) as well as the motherboard's onboard gigabit connection.
I used the onboard gigabit for the first install that worked fine, but now in this second install where I used the dlink connection, the leds to indicate that the onboard lan has a link don't even light.
To further complicate things, my cable provider (Telstra, I'm in Australia) requires that I run a login client before it will let any traffic (besides DNS) pass through to the net. I overcame this problem during the install by switching to the second console (alt-f2) and installing the login client through there.
Anyways, if I can manage to ssh in I'll poke around (which is a little hard because the second network card connected to my switch doesn't show that there is a link, and I have no idea what the IP is that the cable modem has assigned me is).
Cheers,
-Kent