Solved: Permalinks and htaccess

When attempting to change the permalinks to “prettys” I got the feedback message that the htaccess needing manually editing.

I took the appropriate code from the message and put it in the file.

However, having uploaded the htaccess file back up to the server the dashboard page for adjusting the permalinks maintains itself at “You should update your .htaccess now.”

This appears to be stuck, how do you get out of this mode? Do you have to log out and log back in again or do something else to get the system to recognize that the file has been changed.

I was questioning whether my editing or file placement was the cause of the problem but one experiment indicated both are correct. However, this also raises some questions about the correct procedure. Initially I put the following code into the htaccess file, which appeared to be blank.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

When this didn’t work I looked around in the forum and found this version of the code:

# BEGIN WordPress

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
ErrorDocument 404 /index.php?error=404
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

Not knowing how this file should be formatted I tried the second version and it appeared to work.

However, now I want to change the permalink format to a custom version and as noted in the beginning the dashboard page appears to be frozen on You should update your .htaccess now.”

I’ve believe I’ve read through the documentation and can’t find anything that addresses this problem.
Permissions on the file are set at 644

Any suggestions on how to solve this issue.

Apologies for the long post.