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A white page or a page with a 500 Internal Server Error is, in fact, either a .htaccess issue to a PHP fatal error in disguise.

First, let's see if it is a .htaccess issue. Try renaming the .htaccess file in your site's root to htaccess.bak If there is a .htaccess file in the site's administrator directory, try renaming it as well. If that solves the problem, the issue was with a directive in your .htaccess file. We'd like to recommend you to try removing directives from your .htaccess until you find the one which causes the problem.

If that doesn't help, the error you are receiving is in fact a PHP error in disguise. First, check your server's error logs (not the access logs) immediately after visiting the page which throws the error. There should be an exact description of the PHP fatal error which occurred. Sometimes you can find the error messages in files called error_log or error.log inside the site's root and/or administrator directories. If unsure about the error log location, please consult your host. Most likely the error logs are available in your site's cPanel, Plesk control panel or similar hosting account management facility.

If your host does not give you access to the error logs and you have access to the Joomla! administrator area, please log in to your site's back-end, go to Global Configuration, click on the Server tab and set the Error Reporting to Maximum (Joomla! 1.5) or Development (Joomla! 2.x and later). Try visiting the problem page again.

If you still get a blank page, edit your configuration.php file and put the following code right after the final closing curly brace ( this is what a curly brace looks like --> } ) but before the closing PHP tag (it looks like ?> that is a question mark and a greater-than sign):

ini_set( 'display_errors', true );
error_reporting( E_ALL ); 

Try visiting the problem page again.

If you still get a white page, please remote the two lines from your configuration.php file. Edit the .htaccess file in your site's root. If you don't have a file named .htaccess create a new one. Beware that htaccess.txt is a DIFFERENT FILE and will NOT work! Add the following to the end of the file:

php_flag display_errors On
php_value error_reporting 32767

and retry loading the problem page.

If you still get a white page, remove the two lines from your .htaccess file. Now, create a file called php.ini with the following content:

display_errors=on
error_reporting=E_ALL

and upload it into your site's root and your site's administrator directory. Retry loading the problem page.

IMPORTANT: Sometimes the error won't show. Edit your configuration.php and find the line starting with public $error_reporting and set it to:

public $error_reporting = 'development';

This instructs Joomla! to enable maximum error, warnings and notices verbosity. In 99.9% of cases it will result in the error messages being shown on the browser.

Please note that if you can not understand what the PHP error message means, just copy and paste it here verbatim so that we can take a look and point you to the right direction.

It's not corrupt.

On the source server you had used the administrator password protection feature in Admin Tools. This creates a .htaccess and a .htpasswd file to tell Apache to apply the authentication check before displaying anything in the administrator directory of your site, including the login page.

Here's the problem. The contents of the .htpasswd file are platform dependent. The password needs to be stored in it in a hashed format which is different by Apache version and operating system. Moreover, the actual commands to tell Apache to enable authentication differ between different versions of Apache. For example, what works on Apache 2.4 running on Linux can't be used on Apache 2.2 running on Windows and vice versa. Admin Tools detects the version of Apache and the operating system at the time of enabling this feature and generates the appropriate .htaccess and .htpasswd files in your site's administrator directory. However, if you move your site to a different server and the installed version of Apache there doesn't understand the hashing format of the password or the instructions it throws a 500 Internal Server Error.

That's why you get the Internal Server Error.

The solution: delete the .htaccess and .htpasswd files from your administrator directory. Go to Admin Tools, Administrator password protection. Re-enable the protection. A new set of files, appropriate for your new server, will be created.