WordPress MU

In hindsight, I probably should have know better. Here's what happened:

A few days ago I switched to pretty permalinks and all was well. Then I needed to switch to Linux hosting since I was installing WPMU. After that whole change, permalinks didn't work. The links looked right, but when you try to click, it takes you to the 404 page. So I read a few forums, and it looked like my htaccess file was named incorrectly (was htaccess.dist, rather than .htaccess) so I went in through FTP and changed it. Now, I get a 500 Internal Server error on all sites and can't access my WPMU admin panel.

Please help and please tell me a reinstall is not needed. I think I might cry if you tell me that. Thanks, I really appreciate all the help I've been getting from this wonderful community!

the .htaccess file is created during installation. Renaming the htaccess.dist file wont work.

Can you go back to your old hosting site and find the .htaccess file there and copy it over to your new host.

While a reinstall is a bit intimidating and seems like overkill, it can actually be a fairly easy and quick way to resolve these problems.

Make a backup of your install, delete everything except the stuff in the wp-content folder and ftp the wpmu files back onto the server. Run throught the install script, entering all the same information as before, and it will just pick up the existing database and your entire site is restored!

There are other approaches, like Steve mentioned, but knowing you can do a reinstall over the database is part of what I consider to be an essential admin understanding for maintaining a wpmu server.