Installing Drupal

I am a beginner at Drupal. I tried to install Drupal latest stable 6.19 on Windows Vista platform following instructions but installation stuck on username password and would not allow continuation.

It happened that I have an existing website in Drupal with installed modules and databases. It has been maintained by some developers before, but now I've decided I could do a lot of things by myself (like patching and so on) and need to download everything in my local environment. How could I do it, any advice?

Hi
I uses Helm to manage my domains running PHP5 and MySQL5 first I Got HTTP Error 500 I solve this error by deleting .htaccess file,after that the website works fine but without subdirectory (ie when I navigate to another page I got HTTP Error 404 - File or directory not found).I read this http://drupal.org/node/163014 does not work.
I don't know what to do I'll be grateful if someone help me.

This is my first time using Drupal and I want to try it on my pc before i try it on the server and risk doing something wrong. Now that I have downloaded the files to my hard drive from drupal.org, how do I install them.. I do not see an executable file????

Hi
I'm having difficulty connecting to my sql database. I have altered my default/settings.php file to point the site in the direction of 'mynyddnew'
extract:-
* Database URL format:
* $db_url = 'mysql://username:password@localhost/databasename';
* $db_url = 'mysqli://username:password@localhost/databasename';
* $db_url = 'pgsql://username:password@localhost/databasename';
*
* $db_url = 'mysqli://barryd:**********@localhost/mynydd';*/
$db_url = 'mysql://webadmin:**********@localhost/mynyddnew';

Hi,

I'm trying to install Drupal on my Mac but the installation stops complaining about write permissions for settings.php

I allready changed the permissions according to the tons of information you can get about this problem. I also created the directory sites/default/files. But still Drupal complains that there ist no files directory and or that it cannot write to it.

To me this looks like Drupal reads a different directory!? How can I get information about where Drupal is checking the directories or does anyone have an idea what I can do?