multiple errors, not redirecting, apache2/htaccess - .htaccess

Question

Here is my .htaccess file
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^. /archive/index.php [L]
going to domain.com will redirect me to www.domain.com
however, going to domain.com/2011/11/18/blog-title will show http://domain.com/var/htdocs/public_html/ instead in the browser URL.
My objective is any page at domain.com will redirect to www.domain.com
and wether I go to www.domain.com or domain.com /YYYY or /YYYY/MM or /YYYY/MM/DD will pass a PHP REQUEST_URI so I can get data from a MySQL database.
I originally copied the .htaccess file from WordPress but it doesn't seem to work properly since /var/htdocs/public_html appears in the browser URL bar.

Answer 1

This will do the trick:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\. [NC]
RewriteRule ^ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]
Or this if you want a specific domain:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]
The rules are from Drupal 7 and Drupal 6 respectively and have always worked well for me
EDIT
Looking at your code again I think the only problem is that you don't have a / between http://www.domain.com and $1. Other than that it's pretty much identical to the second example above which definitely works