Most importantly the thing I noticed is when I seen all the youtube videos for the xblast ot boots to a blue screen os with no writing in the upper right. If you watch my videos they boot to a purplish screen as well as having 2 error messages in the upper right corner of the screen saying something about the boot sector, also I did notice that even on a successful boot the led on the ring is In fact red for a split second before the booting of the os as others have mentioned
The led flashing red once is normal as has been explained already. The error message you get is likely due to the fact you have no harddrive connected. If the os can't find a harddisk, it can't unlock it and it can't read it's boot sector. So, it displays an error about this. The color being purplish can be a screen issue as well. The fact it already shows a blue screen without video signal doesn't help to figure out when it's getting video or not.
I'm still following this thread and such so people know I just haven't had a moment to actually do anything with this project right this second, hopefully sometime Thursday night I can screw with it some more