File Moving Issue

[Clairebug]

I need to give a bit of background here - trying to help a friend who naively downloaded serious amount of material right into the iTunes library and could no longer seed it.

We moved all the files back. Got them all working after downloading just about 1% to each file - no doubt tag issues. But then, we ran into this snafu:

He decided to move a new download that he had put on his desktop to the newly created download folder. Following the procedure that I found her in the forum written by Ultima, he moved the folder, told uTorrent the correct path to the folder containing the files, and started to seed, at which point dowloading resumed. However the files are there, and they were not altered.

I wanted to see if I could duplicate this problem so I downloaded one track to my default download location, then stopped the torrent, but did not stop uTorrent. I opened the containing folder, gently dragged the file to my desktop, and back again.

And got the same problem he got. File is showing as all red in the files pane, tracker says scrape okay, should be able to seed this torrent (I grabbed a track on a popular torrent to make sure there were leechers). If I restart the torrent, it only wants to download it. If I stop and force recheck, nothing happens.

I stopped it two times, did the right-click, advanced, set download location (which was the original location). This file was only out of that folder for 10 seconds at the most.

What is causing this behavior? How can I determine if the file was altered by the mere act of moving it? And is it possible that windows XP alters files when then are moved?

I went back and did the entire thing start to finish again, and was able to duplicate the same behavior.

Using Windows XP pro sp2 and original release of uTorrent 1.8

Thanks to anyone who can unravel this mystery!

[thelittlefire]

... If a recheck doesn't find the files, then you need to compare Save As in the General tab to right click, open containing folder.

[Clairebug]

Actually, I received an answer on IRC, which adequately supplied enough information to me about what happens with cross indexing when this is done. Theoretically, one should be able to move files about and put them back where they were, but in practice, this may not work. For my moved file, only a tiny bit of the file in the Files pane showed as red, and the rest was blue, and I only lost about 1%. In the case of my friend, I do believe you are correct - it is an attention to details issue. I asked him to send me a screenshot of his music folder directory list and saw numerous misspellings and typos. I advised him that they needed to be exact, and have left him to fix his mess on his own, my work being done. It is amazing how many people see Animal and Annimal as the same word. Thanks for the answer.

One thing I did learn from DWKnight was that moving an entire FOLDER is much safer than moving an idividual file due to poor indexing.