Cant login to admin panel on sub-domain duplicate installation

Ok so I am building a Zen Cart 1.5.0 site on the following domain isawusa.com I also have a subdomain dealers.isawusa.com the sub-domain will be for wholesale only. After creating the main site I copied all the contents of the root directory (html folder) on my web server into the /dealers folder (html/dealers) on the same server (this is where the sub-domain points to).

I then copied the database from the main site into a new database (different names but otherwise identical at this point). Finally I updated the /dealers/admin_panel/includes/configure.php file and the /dealers/includes/configure.php to reflect the different url for http and https (dealers.isawusa.com vs isawusa.com) and of course I changed the database connection information so that it connects to the new duplicate database.

At this point if I go the dealers.isawusa.com everything appears to be working just fine, however I am unable to login to the admin panel for the dealers.isawusa.com sub-domain (https://dealers.isawusa.com/admin_panel/login.php?). When I input my username and password and click login, it simply refreshes the page without actually logging me in... it just brings me right back to the login page without displaying any messages or errors.

I have tried deleting my browser cookies and cache and renaming the .htaccess file under /dealers/admin_panel/includes to .htaccessBAK but none of this has worked.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks in advance.

What browser are you using? Have you tried a different browser?
Chrome and Firefox and IE and Safari all handle cookie designations differently, and they might be getting confused because of the shared domain name.
The "screen refresh without error message" is symptomatic of it being unable to set a valid session cookie and thus unable to start a session.

And/or you need to run the fix_cache_key utility because your subdomain site is configured inside the database to still point to the non-subdomain site for its session handling. See this FAQ article, which explains the same thing as what you've just tried to do, albeit you're using the same server in this case. The same steps all apply equally. http://www.zen-cart.com/content.php?...t-installation

I followed those instructions... I started by deleting the database I created and then I deleted the installation on the subdomain. Then I used the auto installation feature on godaddy to create a new zen cart installation on the subdomain. After that was complete I saved the new configure.php and admin configure.php files and then deleted everything in the subdomain folder. Then I opened up the new database and dropped all the tables, I then exported the database on the main site to sql with the complete inserts and extended inserts option selected. I then ran the sql in the new database so the two databases are identical. Then I copied the main site to the subdomain folder and replaced the configure.php and admin configure.php files with the ones I saved earlier... tada! it works now