need serious help with index.php, htaccess and wp-config

Okay so everything was going great with my site that I have been building for 2 months – my install directory is /wordpress2 – I was following these instructions on how to make it so that you can just go to my normal site name (www.daily-mash.com) without having to add the /wordpress2.
these are the instructions:

“Go to the General panel.
In the box for Site address (URL): change the address to the root directory’s URL. Example: http://example.com
Click Save Changes. (Do not worry about the error message and do not try to see your blog at this point! You will probably get a message about file not found.)
Copy (NOT MOVE!) the index.php and .htaccess files from the WordPress (wordpress in our example) directory into the root directory of your site—the latter is probably named something like www or public_html. The .htaccess file is invisible, so you may have to set your FTP client to show hidden files. If you are not using pretty permalinks, then you may not have a .htaccess file. If you are running WordPress on a Windows (IIS) server and are using pretty permalinks, you’ll have a web.config rather than a .htaccess file in your WordPress directory.
Move (DON’T COPY) the wp-config.php file to your root directory.
Edit your root directory’s index.php.
Open your root directory’s index.php file in a text editor
Change the line that says:
require(‘./wp-blog-header.php’);
to the following, using your directory name for the WordPress core files:
require(‘./wordpress/wp-blog-header.php’);
Save the file.
Login to your site (if you aren’t still already). The URL should still be http://example.com/wordpress/wp-admin/
If you have set up Permalinks, go to the Permalinks panel and update your Permalink structure. WordPress will automatically update your .htaccess file if it has the appropriate file permissions. If WordPress can’t write to your .htaccess file, it will display the new rewrite rules to you, which you should manually copy into your .htaccess file (in the same directory as the main index.php file.)”

I have used this file before with other installs and it worked just fine – this time however, it did not.
I backed up my entire /wordpress2 folder before I did this and I have copies of all of the files in question (htaccess,index.php and wp-config) – I have uploaded the entire folder to my server and now I am not able to access my website AT ALL – when I type in /wordpress2 I get a 404 and when I just do http://www.daily-mash.com I get a 500 internal server error.

I have tried what feel like every combination of the backed up files in my default directory and nothing seems to make the website come back – I have been working on this FOREVER – can someone PLEASE help me figure out how to get my site back?!?! Thank you so much in advance for the help!!