Multiple WordPress installations in subfolders .htaccess

Hello ??

I have WordPress 2.8.6 installed on three locations on my domain:

domain.com root
domain.com/folder1
domain.com/folder2

Unfortunately I cannot use WP MU at this time so I am just using three separate installations.

They were all messing up and I couldn’t get one to show if the other was showing, so I used this in the .htaccess:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/(folder1|folder2)/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /%1/index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /%1/index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

But now, .html or any other files in the root are not visible (404 Not Found).

I would like my WP permalinks in the root, folder 1 and folder 2 to work properly, and all of the other .html (old) files to also be visible.

Could someone please help me out? I apologize in advance if I made any silly mistakes — new to this!

thank you very much.