uTorrent lost awareness of all seeds and partial downloads

[septimo]

I was running uTorrent 3.3.2 (build 30303, 32-bit) on Windoze 8.  I rebooted the PC and started uTorrent and it came up with all its windows empty: zero downloads, zero seeding and zero completed.

Before the shutdown, I was seeding about half a dozen torrents and downloading 10 or 12, but at this point they were nowhere in sight.  So I checked to make sure all the uTorrent directories were present and accounted for.  The torrent folder (and the torrents) still were there, the partial downloads folder and files still were there, and the completed files folder and files still were there.  So I checked in uTorrent's configuration options and confirmed that it still was pointing to the correct directories.  It was.

Scrolled through Eventvwr to see if anything jumped out at me.  No joy.  So I rebooted again.  No change.  Uninstalled and re-installed uTorrent without deleting the configuration files.  No difference.

Checked online and found Build 30586 was available.  Dowloaded 30586.  Backed up the uTorrent configuration folders (because I don't know what would be deleted), uninstalled 30303, including deleting configuration files, and installed 30586.

Started 30586 and downloaded one small torrent to make sure all folders had been created, shut down uTorrent, rebooted (to make certain it was completely shut down and all files/folders were released), then copied the old torrent files and partial download files into the correct new folders.  Restarted uTorrent and it still isn't aware of my old seeds or partial downloads.

At this point I'm still thinking something went wonky in my old configuration, which is why it stopped recognizing my seeds and partial downloads.  So I think it would be inviting trouble to copy the old files into the new installation wholesale, but I also don't know which files contain the information about the seeds and partial downloads.

So if somebody can clue me in to which files do what, or how I can make uTorrent 30586 aware of what I'm trying to seed, and what I was in the process of downloading, I'd appreciate it.

[rafi]

The resume.dat file is the one you are looking for. It contains the info of all your jobs. Search for the older copy of it , or the *.old version of it and try put it where your settings.dat file is (Either with the exe, or in your %appdata%/utorrent, depends on your installation).

[septimo]

Thank you for that, rafi.

 

Both of the old installation's resume files were only 1 kb, which made me suspicious, so I compared them using Windoze's native file compare (fc.exe).  They were identical.  Also identical to the new installation's resume file (because I removed the one completed torrent).

 

Please correct me if I'm mistaken but I'm guessing that means I'm SOL.  Will it work if I re-add the torrents, then force a re-check?  Sorry about asking for the hand-holding, but I don't want to do anything that might screw up the existing seed and partial downloads files, some of which are several GB.

[rafi]

Yeah, SOL, probably overwritten by uT itself   Better re-search again for resume.* . Yes, you can reload and recheck. Tips and guides are mentioned here:

 

http://forum.utorrent.com/topic/88524-re-recognising-torrents-after-fresh-os-install/?p=480171

[septimo]

This isn't quite working out as well as I'd hoped.

When I re-added the first of the old completed torrents (24.5 Gb file size, which obviously I would be very keen to resume seeding), I found that uTorrent was looking in the wrong place for the files.  Partial downloads are configured to go to ~\AppData\Roaming\uTorrent\Partials.  But uTorrent was looking for them ("Open Containing Folder") in ~\AppData\Roaming\uTorrent, so I moved the files there.

Fortunately, when I ran the forced recheck, it located the files, found all present and correct and judged the torrent completed.  Then it moved the torrent to "Completed" and began seeding.  However, it ignored the directory designated in the configuration for completed downloads and left them in ~\AppData\Roaming\uTorrent.

Not ideal but at least it was working.  So I re-added the second of my completed torrents.  Only this time, uTorrent was looking for its files in My Documents.



As you can see, I didn't tell uTorrent to store or look for files in My Documents.  Is this problem at all correctable, or must I call for the family exorcist?

[septimo]

I've figured out the "My Documents" problem.  If you start a torrent, and no download has yet begun, it always looks for the files in the "My Documents" directory.  Once the download began, uTorrent created the proper directory within the partial downloads directory.  If I "stop" the torrent, delete the .!ut file(s), copy the old completed download files into that directory, then force a re-check, uTorrent recognizes them, moves the torrent to "Completed," and even moves the directory from partial downloads to completed.

 

I guess uTorrent just needed a while to get its thoughts together.

[SamirSharar]

dude jst click 'oped file location " on ur dekstop shortcut .. theres gonna be a lotta links jst press da one u were looking for nd it stars from the place it dissepeared .. nd if it dosnt ,, skip da files u skipped before

[computronix]

Sorry to resurrect this topic from the dead, but I just had this problem and Google landed me here. All I had to do to fix the problem was go to %appdata%/uTorrent and double-click on the .torrent files for the torrents I wanted to re-start. uTorrent opened them and started checking them right away, then resumed downloading them. Dunno why it didn't find them on startup.

 

Hopefully this will be helpful to the next Googler that comes along.

[netrider]

Thanks so much to all of you who contributed to this solution.  My question is: how do I (re)report this bug so that hopefully it'll get fixed?  It's a huge scare and a bit of a pain to work around.