Files just disappeared! How do I get them back?

[bitslapped]

I was downloading a torrent composed of about 50 numbered rar files, totalling about 3.5GB.

When it was extremely close to completion the status of the torrent went to 'Error: file is missing' or something like that. When I restarted and ever since it has just been saying 'Error:'.

Most of the files don't exist in the folder anymore. About 17MB remains of the torrent after deciding to do a recheck. I have been using utorrent for years and never had anything like this.

I did a chkdsk with acronis, and the disk seems to be fine.

I looked at faq and some other posts and this seems a little different.

EDIT: Using utorrent 1.7.2

[DreadWingKnight]

Sounds like something on your system deleted the files.

Btw: current version is 1.7.5

[bitslapped]

any idea what program would do that?

could a virus do something like this?

i was in utorrent when it happened. I was moving another file up from 3 to 2 in the queue, this torrent was 1, I didn't touch it.

[DreadWingKnight]

A virus could do such a thing.

Any other malware could.

Heck, even stupid antivirus software could.

[bitslapped]

ok i know a lot of stuff could do this. What program would want to do this?

Has anyone else experienced something similar?

[furreee]

I have experienced this problem. My OS is Vista and I think I have a solution to it.

I believe once you turn on windows media player it automatically starts to infiltrate and change your files, especially if you have asked it to monitor certain files such as the file you download into. It will change certain aspects of some downloaded files and they will no longer be recognised by the torrent software. You can force a re-check and then start the torrent again and the seemingly missing files will be replaced, the files probably did not go missing in the first place, just changed (check your download folder and see). They will go/change/etc again if you turn windows media player back on.

Solution: stop windows media player monitoring the directory/file/folder you download into. Wait until you have seeded the downloaded file to about 2 or 3 then move the file to 'My Music' or wherever else you want it to be and then end/close/remove the torrent.

Horrid solution tho, means you have to wait for sometimes quite a while before you can do anything with your downloads. Or you could use another player if you cannot wait.

I hope this answers your need.