Thank you for the information.
This alone didn't work but someone else advise me to set the time back to Auto from Internet and it started working
For anyone else that may have ran into the same situation as me: Going into HFW and booting apps = i had to set it up MANUALLY to East Coast (USA) time in order for anything to work. To get into CFW afterwards, I had to change the time back to AUTOMATIC FROM INTERNET.