.htaccess question

I have (or rather had) a site where someone would enter www.mysite.com/something. The 'something' did not exist, but using .htaccess I sent it to a page called www.mysite/com/lookup.html where a bit of javascript would parse that piece off the URL and use it as data. I looked 'something' up in a database using php, and if it found it, I sent it to a page that would display some stuff from the database.
I say 'had' instead of 'have', because the site is now on a different (though still apache) host, and the .htaccess is working differently. Now when I look at the URL in lookup.html, instead of finding the original www.mysite.com/something, I am finding www.mysite.com/lookup.html. Any idea what I could have done wrong? On the old site, I had coded the .htaccess from scratch. On the new site, the host had generated a bunch of additional lines. I can attach the old and new version if that will help at all.

I can attach the old and new version if that will help at all.
Yes please do.

you may not have done anything wrong. The htaccess file functionality/defaults can be controlled by what is in the apache conf file so your apache servers very likely are configured differently:

so to redirect any specific file this should work but only if you have the authority as granted in apache conf file to do it.


Redirect permanent /something.htm http://www.mydomain.com/anydirectory/anyfilename.htm

easiest if you give the actually file names and locations and then I can be certain of getting it right.

The thing is, it does redirect. My problem is getting to the value of the original URL.

Thanks for the reply. The problem turned out to be...programmer headspace. In the environment that worked, I had coded the error 404 page as a file path off of the document home. In the one that wasn't working, I had enteted it as a URL. As soon as I changed it to a file path, it worked as I wanted it to.