Thread: Utorrent issues - file not found, invalid download state (USB drive)

I'm running into issues with utorrent after adding an external USB drive. But it's not completely clear to me what the problem is. Perhaps someone else might see something obvious here that I am overlooking?

In short, I'm seeing a handful of torrents fail after a day or two with a file not found status. Stopping the torrent changes the torrent status to invalid download state. A forced recheck does not help unless I reboot first, then every thing goes back to normal for a day or two until the problem returns. The problem does not occur if the torrents are seeded from the internal drive, so it does not seem to be a tracker issue. The error only occurs after seeding more than 24 hours from the USB drive.


Some more details, chronologically..
Stable system, no issues
utorrent 2.21
windows XP SP3 .....(x86, 2.4Ghz dual core, 4 GB RAM)



Problems noticed after adding
WD 2TB external (USB 2) drive .....(wdbaau0020hbk)

Observations
I first noticed problems shortly after adding the external USB drive. This was also while Waffles was free leech, so I was also seeding substantially more items than I normally would. About 400 torrents (typ. <10% active) vs. about 150 torrents (typ. <5% active).

The first thing that I noticed was half a dozen torrents marked in red in utorrent with the error that the file could not be found. No obvious pattern, torrents of varying size, from various trackers, not just WFL. Forcing a recheck did not always return a valid status. But after a reboot, a forced recheck always succeeds and returns the torrent to a valid seeding status.

Looking into this a bit further
SMART status is valid on internal and external drives.
Extended WD (drive manufacturer) diagnostics find no problems on either drive
Extended surface scan finds no bad sectors
No viruses or spyware found or suspected
I have tried a different USB cable
The USB power supply appears stable, as measured by a DMM

The windows event log shows
event 4221 Tcpip TCP/IP has reached the security limit imposed on the number of concurrent TCP/IP connect attempts
event 57 ftdisk the system failed to flush data to the transaction log. Corruption may occur

Event 4221 is apparently due to the new/low concurrent TCP limit (10) imposed by SP2 as a way to limit the spread of worms
No worms here past or present, so I changed the TCP limit to 50 and subsequently to 1000
This resolved the 4221 errors and most of the event 57 errors. Still seeing the occasional event 57.

The error does not occur if all torrents are seeded from the internal drive.
The error only shows up after 24 - 48 hours when seeding from the external drive
Reducing the number of seeded torrents to ~ 100 did not change anything

I have also noticed that if I restart more than 50 seeding torrents at once, that many will stay in a Queued state for a prolonged or indefinite period of time. But if I stagger restarting the seeding torrents in groups of <50 separated by a few minutes, it works flawlessly. This may or may not be normal behaviour and may be unrelated to the rest of this.

My tentative conclusion is that communication with the external drive is becoming unreliable after 24 hours. No actual data corruption has been seen, but random torrents fail and at least once I could not access a file from windows explorer, that was accessible and confirmed to be sound after a reboot. But it's not clear to me exactly what or why this is happening. I am currently looking into the event 57 message.

Any ideas?

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3 reasons why utorrent show this error as far as i know

1. drive is full
2. drive not NTFS but FAT and files are too large
3. USB connection not fast enough, cant write the files and therefor the torrent looses connection to the files (or you download too fast for the disk to keep up)

i had all 3 problems a few years back
solution:

1. clear hd space
2. convert to NTFS
3. check the usb port if that is okay, maybe try other usb port if that works better

could well be there is a connection problem somewhere between the usb port and the external drive
download tuneup utillities and use the drive checker for errors (extensive)

just a couple of things that worked for me

---------- Post added at 09:16 AM ---------- Previous post was at 09:15 AM ----------

i read the article back and see most things you did allready
then i dont know lol

Thanks for the suggestions..

1. Drive is 90% empty
2. Drive is already formatted NTFS
3. USB port tests OK and I had already tried a different USB port

The first two possibilities don't apply. For the third, the port tests OK + I had already tried a different USB port. I'm not using an USB hub, nor was I seeing any 100% drive load messages in utorrent. But it's possible that peak demand might be exceeding the available bandwidth. I'll see if I can find an utility to monitor the port throughput.

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stupid of me not to notice but it is a WD disk i see

i have one WD disk that is the same as all my other externals but this one has the same problem
then windows says its damaged sometimes, but when doing extensive hd tests they are all negative

could be WD problem ( i did drop it once 10 inches from the floor lol)
when connect another HD (same type) i dont have that problem

i am also running about 150 torrents

one question
Are you cross seeding, i mean are there multiple torrents with same name for diff trackers?

mostly i guess the problem must be with the drive ,as the utorrent is not able to access the file from the drive.
have u tried fresh utorrent install and formatting the external drive