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Corrupt .Zip - Availability 99.3% - Availability zero - What to do?


abrogard

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I'm completely new to uTorrent.

Just did my first download and it came down to 99.3% When I looked I see that was all that was available.

I've got two other downloads listed. One is 23% available. The other is zero.

Am I doing it wrong trying to download these files?

Should I only ask for files that are 100% available?

I'm thinking, of course, that availability fluctuates hour to hour, day to day and that I'll get the whole file eventually.

But perhaps I'm wrong or only half right and it's the wrong way to go.

Appreciate some guidance.

regards,

ab :)

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Yes, there's > 20,000 seeds in the swarm for one file, >40,000 for the other.

I note the availability of the files does change, it would seem. Because one of these files was once only at 23%.

I now have two downloaded files within a whisker of completion. One at 99.3% complete and the other at 99.6% complete. And that's their availability, too, so unless the availability changes they won't complete will they?

Or perhaps the mix of available files changes from time to time? So that availability can go down as well as up?

And so that the piece I need can suddenly become available, even though availability is perhaps reported as still less than 100% ?

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Torrents with an inordinate amount of seeds/peers, yet which have issues with stopping when nearing completion, and with availabilities less than 1.0 are generally fake torrents. It's junk data being shared that you normally can't finish, probably initially shared by some anti-P2P agency of sorts. If you ever do manage to complete it, it's (again) junk data. You'll also find that you often have LOTS of hashfailed pieces when downloading fake torrents.

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Okay, thank you for that.

I will delete them and seek alternatives.

I selected them because they were at the top of the list the index threw up. I kinda thought that meant the most popular hence most reliable. Wrong. :(

It seems peculiar to me, though. Why don't they (these agencies) put up a valid torrent that is something other than the file you want when you try to run it - a propaganda message, perhaps, a piece of advertising, anything.... but why just crippled junk?

Oh... the answer just occurred to me, maybe... if they did any of those things it could be taken that they were actually using the p2p mechanism themselves.... ah well...

It's an interesting world, the internet, isn't it?

regards,

ab :)

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WinRar has an inbuilt repair function which sometimes fixes a problem. Sometimes mp3 files are fine, but won't unzip due to CRC fail or some other nonsense. Normally I would avoid zipped files. Sometimes you find they need passwords also, but these are probably fakes. Sometimes if WinRar won't repair, you can open with 7zip, or another zip or file repairer. I haven't tried it yet for repair, but Phoenix file recovery should also repair or extract files, and you don't need extra drives.

btw these agents also wish to cause frustration due to wasting time and money in dl'ing rubbish rather than valid files, since it also serves their purpose.

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Thanks for the input regarding winrar and such. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) I've deleted the files and emptied the garbage bin.

I'd like to avoid getting any more like that. But how? It seems you have to get into actually downloading before you can check the availability, right? And that's about the only thing to go by?

I've only tried two index sites so far : isohunt and torrentspy. Isohunt is where I got the 'bad' files from and torrentspy just seemed such a mess I got nothing there at all.

Perhaps I'm hanging out in the wrong neighbourhoods entirely?

utorrent (how do I get that special character 'mu' ?) seemed such a good thing after the hassles I've been having with klite... but now I'm not so sure...

regards,

ab :)

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Actually, the 'bad' files are in the neighbourhoods "they" most want to corrupt.

The moment you launch a torrent file in µTorrent, it'll tell you what kinds of files it tries to download...that's often a clue right there.

Single files <300 MB of size shared as a multi-part .rar file is a pretty likely suspect of being fakes.

...and even if they're real, they're easy to corrupt as you have to have 100% to use it.

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