Why does limewire have such a hard time resuming incomplete files?

I wanted to move the incomplete/saved folder to another drive with more storage however limewire refused to change and continued writing to the old location (starting from 0%..)

I made a backup of the downloads.dat file and decided to alter its contents to change all the paths from the old location to the new one however this didn't work right and was still starting at 0%

So I decided to undo what i've done move the files back and restore the downloads.dat backup but now the files still stay at 0% so i have to re-download everything again

It's rather frustrating limewire always has this flaw/dependancy on downloads.dat why can't it just look at the incomplete folder check all the files and attempt to resume them so i can just ditch everything place the incomplete files in a folder and let it resume

Is their any tool that i can use to rebuild a new downloads.dat file which will allow limewire to resume downloads from where they last left off?

Thanks

(Same situation i had 2 years ago http://www.gnutellaforums.com/new-fe...ncomplete.html and i see a few others have had similar problems)

When you set the LW settings to download to a new location, usually only the new downloads will go to the new incomplete folder location (there might be some exceptions). The older incomplete files will continue in the older incomplete folder location. Yes this has always been an issue and is a bit of a PITA.

The only solution I could think of could be a total PITA if you have a very large number of incomplete files and still this is purely theory.

If you open up the Downloads.dat file, you will notice the incomplete files give a directory map of location. You could try manually changing those to the new location.

Example: change: C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\My Documents\King-Song.mp3
to:
F:\LW Downloads\King-Song.mp3

And change

C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Incomplete\T-7256901-King-Song.mp3

to:
F:\LW Downloads\Incomplete\T-7256901-King-Song.mp3

And any other occurrences of same items listed.

If you are using LW 5, the downloads.dat file is stored in LW's main preferences.

However it sounds like you might be using LW 4, in which case you may need to copy these details and the all the other related details for each file from the old Downloads.dat file to the new one in the newer incomplete folder (example on Drive F). All the other details (which are somewhat unreadable) will be other details listing the file's Hash information as well as previously downloaded %, etc. etc.

* From what I can see, the Downloads.dat file lists both the eventual download location, AND the incomplete folder location in next paragraph or so.

If you are using LW 4 it would make such a test more complicated because you'd need to copy-paste sections of each file listed in the downloads.dat file to the other one.

Of course all this would need to be done whilst LW is closed.

Hey lotr i actually did try that before posting here (wrote a small app to replace all instances in the .dat file using binary read/write methods)

I was using the latest LW at the time being 5.5.8 (or was it 5.8?)

The outcome was limewire noted the new location of the files (allowing me to right click - open from disk~) and it would goto the new disk however they all started at 0%

I did read around and noted it shows 0% but will jump up as soon as it starts downloading. unfortunately that was not the case and it started the file from the start

Thank you for the response Limewire should include functionality to inspect files and determine if they are incomplete or not and if so resume them

Shouldn't be to hard to append information at the end of the file (since it pre-allocates the full file size even if you've only partially downloaded bits of it) then use that information as a header that way it can still preview the files without corrupting it and not need the downloads.dat file

/minirant

Thanks again

And you tried manually moving the incomplete files to the new location also after adjusting the downloads.dat file? I'm guessing you did. This is an issue worth bringing up with the devs to see if this can be improved for the future. Heck, with torrent programs it's actually quite easy to change file location whether the file is incomplete or completed (seeding/sharing).