It's been a little over a month since you first asked this question and, as you can tell, you didn't get a lot of suggestions. The reason is that you did not provide anywhere near enough detail for anyone to make an educated guess about what is happening. The "authentication details haven't been recognized" error is quite common. Maybe you used the wrong password. Maybe the alfresco.war didn't start up for some reason. Perhaps the server is configured to authenticate against LDAP and the LDAP server is down. Who knows!
Anyway, hopefully by now you've got it working. If not, definitely provide details such as any exceptions you are seeing in the log, what version you are running, your authentication chain, whether or not you are logging in as admin, whether or not going to /alfresco returns anything, whether or not you can log in to the admin console, etc.
Help us help you!
