Search Engine Friendly URLs not working

When I set the URL's to search engine friendly in global configuration...all of the links send me to a 404 page...any idea what causes this...i can message backend user access

Hi,

Did you renamed the htaccess.txt file to .htaccess ?

How do I go about doing that. I tried to do it in Filezilla and Dreamweaver and it wouldn't let me name the file .htaccess....thanks

or maybe this file is hidden now? because files with "." prefix are usually hidden files, so the file disappears after change of the filename.

it's just saying that it won't let me do it...do I need to remove the htaccess.txt file after placing the other one

I've tried to change the file name in filezilla and dreamweaver and it won't allow me to create a file starting with "."

Any idea how I would go about changing this?

Do you have the SSH access to your server? Or other FTP clients? If yes, please try to do it using these ways.