.htaccess redirection help

[SilentK]

I am having some trouble with .htaccess redirection. When I use the default redirection from cpanel it interfers with my subdomains.

Here's the dilema: I have a joomla installation at /portal/
I have a vbulletin installation at / which has been there for a long time and has been indexed by search engines so moving it isn't an option.

I want /portal/ to be the page that loads up when someone loads http://www.xblteams.com/

So what I did was set redirection for /index.html to http://xblteams.com/portal/

This works fine to an extent, however it interferes with my subdomain which when I access it, I get redirected to /portal/ I am guessing this is because it redirects all base /index.html's (all index.html's that are not in subdirectories) according to the url and not actual file paths.

So my question is how do I effectively redirect only http://www.xblteams.com/index.html to http://www.xblteams.com/portal/ (www is optional) and not any other index.html. I am guessing this can be done with mod rewrite but I have a hard time understanding the syntax of mod rewrite. Can anyone be of assistance?

[esl]

One thing you may want to try is creating the subdomain(s) as a separate account in WHM. That should prevent redirect errors.