i tried deleting htaccess_dist but that didnt work so I reuploaded it and renamed it .htaccess and that worked.

Now I am on step 4. Configure site and it is saying "Your data directory /root/data/ does not exist."

It exists, the location is correct. How do I fix this?

anyone please??

The permissions of the directory might not allow the apache webserver to access this directory. I think /root/data is in the home directory of the root user account (at least in Linux it is), so the read/write permissions might be for the root user only. It might be better to create the data directory not in the /root directory and you also need to set the read/write permissions to 777, i.e. permissions for the owner, the group and others to read/write to this directory, or at least to allow read/write access for the user account the webserver is running as.