files show as 100% downloaded, but are not in fact 100% downloaded

[s416a]

Hello all,

I'm using utorrent 2.0 great bandwidth, no problems with firewalls, or sharing ratios with any of my favourite sites.

I recently discovered a movie that I downloaded was skipping fairly rthymically (ie, every 20 seconds), and it would pause, but the audio would play. The frame would then skip, and catch up to the audio. I'm playing these files through a hardware media player. I tried a variety of things, recopied, local playback versus network, even played on local pc with media player - same thing. I then tried to download it again, and noticed that the file was only 75% complete, and looking at the pieces available, it looked like I had missed every 17th piece...despite utorrent telling me it was complete, and actually seeding it. I found another series of files (Season 20 of the Simpsons), - from a private site) - again, only 80% was downloaded, despite it actually seeding back.... has anyone else seen this, or is there something I'm missing in terms of accepting bad pieces, or ignoring failed hashes? I'm seeing this more and more with both my public and private sites.

Thanks

Jon

[moogly]

Only 2.2 is supported, upgrade. And if a forced recheck reaches 100%, so the file is complete. Maybe you have a program that modifies the files like a media player changing the tags in mp3s.

[ed2k]

I had this problem with utorrent 2.2. I just updated to 2.2.1 build 25110, so I don't know if this problem still exist. Only torrents with multiple files were affected though; torrents with few files and without directories were fine. I noticed it when I downloaded two CDs in flac: one was single CD image in flac and cue sheet and it was fine; another CD was set of tracks in flac and cue sheet as well as some artwork and this one had zeros in some files. Same story with VIDEO_TS and blue-ray rips: normally after forced recheck it says 60 to 70 percent complete and downloads missing parts. Forced recheck solves the problem however I don't think this is elegant solution. It's kinda weird to recheck every torrent once it is reported as 100% downloaded.

Thank you

[ed2k]

Yeah, same problem with utorrent 2.2.1 build 25100. Just downloaded 21.1GB blue ray BDMV folder, almost 10GB of data are missing on hard disk (just pre-allocated zero strips in stream files periodically) despite the fact that I am seeding it and it is 100% complete. Looks like files are not flushed to disk time to time. Too bad nobody seems to care.

Thank you.

[ettore]

You aren't downloading to an SSD are you? If so, garbage collection might be rearing it's ugly head.

If not an SSD, I'd download some random file ... let it complete to 100%. Without going to that folder at all, select "Force recheck" (which I assume it will pass). Now, go into the folder (so that Windows sees the file and generates the thumbnail) ... force recheck again. Now, play the file, stop it, and force recheck. If ay any point the check is 100% then changes to anything BUT 100%, then your PC is screwing up the files (which seems pretty likely as the torrent checking algorithm is pretty simple).

[ed2k]

No, I don't use solid state drive (if that is what you mean by SSD). My Windows 2000 and other installed software do not generate any thumbnails and my player doesn't alter media files in any way. There is no problem with any one random file; as I said before you have to download bunch of files like you do when downloading VIDEO_TS or BDMV folders. Also I had more than 10 active torrents for seeding, I don't know if that matters. Without going anywhere, once I noticed that download complete and I am seeding, I selected "forced recheck" and after couple of hours of rechecking 21.1GB utorrent reported I have 30.9% complete. After that I started torrent and downloaded more than 10GB missing parts; surprisingly the second download finished without any missing parts - that is when I "forced recheck" again the torrent was reported 100% complete.

I do use pre-allocation and zero filling when starting torrent download. When utorrent finish download first time there are dumps of zeros in files among the actual data. When I force recheck and finish download second time all those zeros filled up with data that were missing first time. I don't think this is hard drive problem - same sectors that kept zeros first time are keeping valid data after forced recheck and redownload.

I discontinued use of utorrent for this very reason: it added extra miles for electrons I sent overseas. Let me know if you need any additional info about my setup for debugging; however I won't be able to update utorrent client or try some fancy settings.

Thank you.

[ettore]

Don't want to be mean, but your computer takes "a couple of hours" to recheck a 21GB torrent? Even with my 750MHz P3 it'd probably only take ~20 minutes to check (I haven't tried, but it takes about 5 minutes for a 5GB torrent so ....). I'd seriously look into there being something else wrong with your PC ... there is no way it should take that long.

[ed2k]

Yes, my computer is 750MHz P3, how do you know? Yes, it would probably take 5 minutes to check 5GB torrent in lab environment or with very popular local download. In my real case there is a few seeds around the globe. There is nothing wrong with my PC and I don't care how long it takes to recheck. The problem is with data not to be written to the hard drive sometimes. Actually, after reading this board I knew the problem is with my PC or anything but utorrent.

[leetwanker]

Ok, while I was going through my computer to get all the specs for the end of this post, I found something very troubling and potentially the culprit of our problem here. I have a striped set of 640GB drives where all my torrents are saved to. Their status was "Healthy (At Risk)". I looked up what this meant, and here's a quote from Microsoft Help: Cause: Indicates that the dynamic volume is currently accessible, but I/O errors have been detected on the underlying dynamic disk.. I "Reactivated Disk", and I'm waiting to see if the error pops up again. But to s416a (love that name by the way), if you're saving to a dynamic disk, see if you have the "Healthy (At Risk)" status, and get all your data off that/those drive(s) ASAP or risk losing it. I'm already very very worried, I have A LOT of data I don't want to lose on that volume, and already seem to be losing data!

ALL Written before finding the potential problem described above:

Alright guys, I think it's high time people stop changing the topic, criticizing the computer's speed or whatever, and actually try to solve this problem. Would it help if I said please????

I've been dealing with this EXTREMELY ANNOYING problem for weeks now! It doesn't happen with every torrent, only some, I don't see any commonalities between the torrents either.

(Skip this paragraph if you don't wanna hear my rant!)

For example: You have no idea how annoying it is to download a torrent, and when you go to watch it, all the sudden it starts skipping and whatnot. Have to go through your huge list of downloaded torrents (so you can keep track if you missed an episode or something), start the download from scratch (because you've moved it out of the folder some idiot put it in so they could include their .nfo file or whatever because god forbid they just put their group name in the file name), move your mostly completed version of the file into that folder, rename it so that it utorrent recognizes it as the fresh file so you can do a "Force Recheck" and not have to download the whole damn thing again, finish downloading the last 2 percent of it, and then move it right back out of it's own little folder, all before you can watch a show.

So can we get serious with the troubleshooting please? Because I'm at the point that I have to force recheck every file before I do any of the above. Plus, and this is a big plus, there's PROBABLY something wrong with utorrent that is causing this. I tried what someone suggested earlier, and found a file that didn't download completely before I ever touched it with windows or any other program.

Admittedly, being an IT tech, this could be a windows problem, but either way, we need to learn how to fix it. Is anyone with me now that it's just not one poor slob with an old computer that takes a week to recheck a 21GB torrent? PLEASE? PRETTY PLEASE? LOL

Specs:

uTorrent: 3,0 Alpha Build 25043 (But I've upgraded from an earlier build to try and solve this exact problem)

OS: Windows 7 64 Bit

CPU: Intel Core 7 920 CPU @ 2.67GHz

Memory: 3GB DDR3 Memory

Hard Drives: 2 Software Striped 640GB Western Digitals

Resident Programs: No Anti-virus Running that would be touching the files. In fact, the only programs always running (other than Windows services) are PeerBlock, Logitech Setpoint, uTorrent, EventGhost, and MediaPortal.

[GTHK]

You can use smartfan or a smartctl port to get error data from the drive. Windows event log may also have something.