Changing Permalinks to a Custom Permalink causes a 404 Error [no matter what I do]

I’ve changed my permalinks to a custom one. When I saw my contact page was sitting on [domain]/index.php/contact instead of [domain]/contact this isn’t isolated to /contact however. I went and deleted the index.php in the custom string. This came up with of course [domain]/index.php/contact redirecting to [domain]/contact. However this came up with a 404 error page doesn’t exist.

I went and checked and the .htaccess file did not exist so I enabled htaccess and created the file with vim empty then changed the permissions with chmod to 644 as stated the WordPress Codex. Went and re-saved the permalinks to discover I still had a 404 error, this is when I noticed that WordPress still thought the .htaccess file was not writable.

I went and copied the .htaccess file text WordPress wanted me to manually add to the .htaccess file manually. To my anger, still producing a 404 error.

Does anyone know what could be causing this? I’ve never had this issue before. What is happening?

…remove the <IfModule mod_rewrite.c> wrapper? Or include RewriteEngine On at the top of the .htaccess file, above the <IfModule> wrapper?
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@MrWhite Tried it, still get a internal error.

That indicates that you don’t have mod_rewrite installed on your server or you are not permitted to use mod_rewrite in .htaccess files (see the AllowOverride directives for the later) – that will explain why the permalinks are not working.

With the <IfModule mod_rewrite.c> wrapper in place then the directives are simply not processed when mod_rewrite is not installed. It fails silently.

See the following StackOverflow question regarding enabling this:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/869092/how-to-enable-mod-rewrite-for-apache-2-2