By mhm on

If I have somehow missed an already answered version of this question, my apologies, and someone please point me to it.

I am absolutely new to Drupal, and things aren't going so well. First I tried installing through my hosting provider, who has an option to install things like Drupal from the cpanel, but that doesn't work (gives me a page not found error message). (The hosting provider would install Drupal 4.7. I figured I'd install from there, and then switch the files manually to 5.6, but that's obviously not going to be an option. Below, I've been working with 5.6.)

I already set up the MySQL database through my host's cpanel. I have manually put the Drupal files in a subdirectory, www.example.com/drupal/ (The current plan is to keep the regular website up and running while I figure things out in Drupal, and to then get rid of the current website.)

When I try running the install script, I get error 500: The server encountered an unexpected condition which prevented it from fulfilling the request.
The script had an error or it did not produce any output. If there was an error, you should be able to see it in the error log.

I suspect there is something amiss because I'm installing in the subdirectory, but I really don't know what, or how to fix it. Any hints on what I'm doing wrong would be greatly appreciated. (Otherwise, perhaps it is a problem with the host, who is . . . well, not great.)

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

deining’s picture

deining commented

Installing drupal in/from a subdirectory should be fine and shouldn't cause any error.
Do you have access to the error log of your machine? If so please have a look there and post these messages if you can't resolve the issue based on the information given there.
A error 500 can basically mean anything. Really hard to guess the reason unless you provide further information.

Hope that helps
Andreas

mhm’s picture

mhm commented

I've looked in the CGI error log, and there is nothing there. Should there be some other error log I should be looking for?

Thank you!

deining’s picture

deining commented

Yes, you have to come up with further information, otherwise it's hard to tell what's wrong with your system.
Are you using Apache as webserver? You may have a look in the log files of your webserver. There you should see able to see a page access to your drupal installation. This entry may contain an error message, too.

HTH
Andreas

deining’s picture

deining commented

Do you have a .htaccess file in your drupal installation directory? If yes, try to remove or rename that file since the presence of that file may cause a 500 Internal Server Error on some servers.

mhm’s picture

mhm commented

Thanks to all so far for the help. I've been all over the place trying to figure this out. Initially, there was what turned out to be a problem with my hosting. They (theoretically) got that straightened out, which now allows me to at least install through their InstallCentral application, but I still am not getting anywhere productive.

I have tried with the .htacess file, without it, moving it, modifying it, all sorts of things, and that doesn't seem to be triggering (or solving) the problems. Now that drupal is "installed" (in theory), I get a bigger variety of errors, but stll nothing works.

I suspect there may still be a problem with my host, but they're not responding lately, so who knows what that could mean?

Anyway, thank you all. When I can come up with more information, I'll be back with more questions.

scott m. sanders’s picture

scott m. sanders commented

Thanks; moving .htaccess worked for me. :)

ikeigenwijs’s picture

ikeigenwijs commented

the .htaccess was one from drupal self