Re-starting an upload when uTorrent insists on re-downloading

machead · December 12, 2016

I am posting because this has driven me crazy and I see it is also driving others crazy, both the people who ask the question over and over and the people who answer it over and over. I finally got it working, for the moment.

The situation: You have a movie that has been fully downloaded and you still have the torrent file, or you ripped a movie and created a torrent file.

You have been successfully uploading the movie.

Then you moved the movie file to another location on your hard drive or to another computer, or for some reason you stopped the upload, or something.

Now you want to start uploading again, but μTorrent (or Bittorrent) insists on re-downloading the movie instead, potentially wiping out your existing movie file.

At this point: MAKE A COPY OF THE MOVIE FILE and, I guess, of the torrent file. If you try something and your movie file gets wiped out, MAKE ANOTHER COPY so that you always have two good copies, while you march along burning copies as you go.

You’ve tried right-click > Force Re-Check, and the check doesn’t go to 100%, and μTorrent starts re-downloading the movie.

You’ve tried right-click > Advanced > Set Download Location, and selected the location of the movie file, but the movie just keeps downloading.

Try this (demonstrated on uTorrent 1.8.7 on a Macintosh running Mac OS 10.12.1):

Click on the “Add” icon.
Select the torrent file and click Open.
In the window that comes up, you have to do several things:
a.  Navigate to the location where the movie file is (the "Save As" drop-down).
b.  Select the movie file (single-click on the correct file name under "Name").
c.  Check the box next to the movie file. (I think. This might be a superstition.)
Your sign that things are working properly is that the size of the file will show up in the “Size:” field, and the path under "Save As" will be correct.
d. Click OK.
At this point, uTorrent should do something which I imagine involves comparing the values in the torrent file against the video file you pointed it to, such as counting off the file into pieces, checking the number of pieces, and checking the hash of each piece against what is recorded in the torrent file. Or maybe it does something else. I don't know.
If it doesn't do this, force it to by right-clicking on the file in the queue and selecting Force Re-Check. If it's downloading and Force Re-Check is greyed out, stop the download (right-click > Stop) first.
The file check should go to 100%, because you have the whole movie and you're a seed, right? If this happens, and if you checked “Start torrent” in the previous screen, it should start uploading as soon as somebody requests it. Yay.
It doesn't always go to 100%, and it doesn't always start uploading. Often it starts downloading, right over you file, producing a file with an extension that ends in "part". Here are some things that can make the process go haywire:
a. Maybe the torrent file doesn't doesn't actually match the video file. For example:
1) Maybe you renamed either the video file or the torrent file since you made the torrent file. You can use a torrent file editing program to check on what the torrent file has in its Name field, which is what it expects the video file to be named. Or you can just look at the entry in the μTorrent queue for this same information.
2) Maybe you're pointing at the wrong copy of the video file. For example, you put the wrong path, or you lost track of which file goes with which file.
3) Maybe you made the torrent file, then fiddled with the video file in some fashion, so that it's not really exactly the same file that you made the torrent file from.
In any event, from the point of view of the torrent file, it looks like the correct video really does still need to be downloaded.
Remember that even if, according to you, it's the same video file, if there's something slightly different about it, it will no longer count of into the number of pieces the torrent file expects, or the pieces will hash differently, or God knows what-all.
b. Maybe you're pointing at the wrong directory. You can fix that by right-clicking on the video in the queue and selecting Advanced > Set Download Location.

At this point, μTorrent doesn't seem to know whether it's going to upload or download, so you might get the scary warning that you're going to overwrite your file. If you really, truly are going to seed/upload, go ahead and tell it Replace. If it ends up uploading like you want, this just breaks the lock, gets rid of the modal dialog box, and starts the file seeding/uploading. If you've screwed up somehow, then it will download and overwrite your file. YOU DO HAVE DUPLICATES, RIGHT?
If nothing works, consider supernatural assistance. I like the website http://www.luckymojo.com.