I'm trying to implement search engine-friendly URLs using mod_rewrite. I haven't been able to get it to work yet, so I've been cutting things down to the very basics to try and find the problem. So, here are the entire contents of my .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/archive$ /archive.php

Obviously, I want mydomain.com/archive to point to the file, archive.php. However, I try it out and all I get is this:

Not Found
The requested URL /archive was not found on this server.
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

I uploaded in ASCII mode and CHMOD'd to 644, like all the tutorials told me and still nothing.

mod_rewrite may be disabled on my server, but I can't think of any plausible reason why it would be.

Help?

Update:
AUGH!!!!
I just had to remove the leading forward slash? GAKLFJDSKGlhasl;kdasfj!

Sorry to trouble you all.

I got the same problem like yours and up to now, I can't figure it out. My issue is that, the site I am handling has two index pages. one with the index.html and the other is index.php

I can't figure out how to integrate this two site and redirect them to just plain url that look like http://www.domain.com/

I tried out a few other codes and some codes just return an "internal server error"..

Hope I can fix this asap. Just sharing my experience.

What you're describing doesn't actually make the URLs "Search Engine Friendly", but try this:

RewriteRule archive\/ archive.php [nc]

may be the problem is with the slash
try

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^archive$ archive.php

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^archive.*$ archive.php [L]