Upload Drupal Site - 500 Internal Server Error in Admin Areas

[t0lst0y]

I'm trying to upload a Drupal 6.3 site that I've developed on my personal computer onto my shared server here at hostican. For non-Drupalers, this involves copying a directory (my Drupal installation) and importing a mysql database. I've successfully uploaded the directory and imported the database.

The site is fully functional except in any administrative areas. I can load the front page, click through links, but when I try to access an area which is restricted to administrative access, I get a non-Drupal 500 Internal Server Error. My error logs provide no pertinent information. I've tried playing with the .htaccess file but with no success. Perhaps it is a PHP issue, I don't know.

I've successfully transferred sites on my own computer, but I can't seem to get this to work. Am I wrong to assume that most people develop their sites offline and then upload the finished creation onto the server? Or am I supposed to re-do all of the work for my 'online' version once I've perfected the offline one? Any help is greatly appreciated.

[t0lst0y]

I've come to the following solution, for anyone who's struggling likewise. The problem was one of my own misunderstanding.

Task: Move a Drupal site that I had developed on my personal computer to the server.

Solution:
I prepared my finished, offline Drupal site as if for an upgrade. I uninstalled all contributed modules and changed the site's theme to a default one.

I then did a manual, fresh installation of Drupal on the hostican server. After installing Drupal, I deleted the mysql database I had used for the installation, and created a new database with the same name (and user and password) and imported my database from my finished Drupal site on my computer (changed name of database as found in .sql file to match the one on the server before importing).

I then replaced the [site name]/sites/all folder in my Drupal installation on the server with the one from my finished site (this folder includes contributed modules and themes).

After the above was successfully completed, I re-installed all contributed modules and did a database update (ran the update.php script). As far as I can tell, the site is fully functional.

Issues:
I had been attempting to upload my entire Drupal installation, which is unnecessary. I think the issue is linked to file ownership of the [site name]/sites/default/files folder and the file settings.php, as I had encountered problems with that before while performing backups on my personal computer.

[GregCotton]

Thank you for posting this solution as I'm sure it will help lots of others!