Drupal system problems

[Zholl]

Hey there, we recently migrated team2996.com to a Drupal system (I know I said a while ago we would do Joomla, but someone had some experience with Druapal), and we are having some trouble with the site. I'm not sure when it started, but I noticed today that anything past the homepage 404's on me, to the point where I am unable to even sign in to the system (I have verified this in multiple browsers on two different networks, so it shouldn't be an ISP problem). This happened once before, but I can't remember if it fixed itself or not last time, or if that was another episode involving just the sign in. Has anyone had experience with this kind of a problem before, and does anyone have any suggestions on how to go about avoiding this in the future, since I'd rather not have to reinstall the Drupal system every other month, nor would I like to migrate to yet another system after having gotten this one running

[jtdowney]

It appears your mod_rewrite settings are incorrect. Typically these are found in the .htaccess file at the root of your site. I was able to go to http://team2996.com/index.php?q=about where http://team2996.com/about was giving a 404. Drupal in its non-friendly URL mode prefixes everything with index.php?q=[page] and in the friendly URL mode you use mod_rewrite to take everything after the / and pass it to index.php?q=[page] in place of [page]. The folks over at the drupal forums are very helpful and could get you set back up faster then I could.

[Zholl]

Thank you for that explanation! Being able to actually navigate the system, however awkwardly, helped me find the problem. It seems that somehow the .htaccess file was wiped clean on the server end, so the mod_rewrite was no longer enabled on the server. Restoring .htaccess from a backup seems to have fixed the problem, though I still have no idea how the problem came to be in the first place