Old Torrent won't start

[Spicy Mollusc]

Basically, I've got an old torrent I haven't downloaded for ages (computer troubles). In the end, I transferred the hard drive to a friend's computer and tried to get it to finish there - bitcomet is on the same hard drive as the torrent, but a different one to the OS. However, when I told the torrent, which it recognised as present and accurately gave its progress, to start, it didn't do anything. I tried to download another (new) torrent, and that worked fine. I'm naturally unwilling to just discard this torrent and start again, as I've downloaded 5.5 GB of a full 8.5. I tried to download the torrent again, but it just says that I already have it. If it helps, my old computer was windows 2000, the new one is XP. How can I get the thing to start? Basically, no matter how many times I tell it to start, it doesn't, and provides no "stop" option, suggesting it has indeed not started.

[caf4926]

tell us what it says in the trackers section

[Spicy Mollusc]

tell us what it says in the trackers section

It gives a URL (presumably of the tracker) and "DHT Network", followed in both cases by a 0 in the retries section and, again for both, "STOPPED".

[kluelos]

It's quite likely the tracker has dropped the torrent. Many trackers periodicallly prune old torrents that haven't had any activity for a while. You should see an error message from the tracker in this case, something like "torrent not found on this tracker".

Try to find a newer torrent with the same material. You'll have to start over, unfortunately, but older things do often get resurrected on various trackers.

[Spicy Mollusc]

It's quite likely the tracker has dropped the torrent. Many trackers periodicallly prune old torrents that haven't had any activity for a while. You should see an error message from the tracker in this case, something like "torrent not found on this tracker".

Try to find a newer torrent with the same material. You'll have to start over, unfortunately, but older things do often get resurrected on various trackers.

That would be my first suspicion as well. However, I searched for the torrent and it's alive and healthy. I tried to download it, to see what would happen; it gave me a "You already have this torrent" message.

[kluelos]

Note the status icon beside the torrent filename. (Tell us what it is.) Try to start the torrent and observe changes, over a few minutes, and see what that icon does.

"Alive and healthy" -- you mean the web site you got it from shows that? You can't rely on them, unfortunately, because the tracker scrape used to determine that may be hours, or weeks or even months old. Some few torrent sites have a "recheck" function, but most do not, so you simply can't tell how recent that information was. Your client will tell you the current state of the torrent if you know how to read it.

[Spicy Mollusc]

Note the status icon beside the torrent filename. (Tell us what it is.) Try to start the torrent and observe changes, over a few minutes, and see what that icon does.

"Alive and healthy" -- you mean the web site you got it from shows that? You can't rely on them, unfortunately, because the tracker scrape used to determine that may be hours, or weeks or even months old. Some few torrent sites have a "recheck" function, but most do not, so you simply can't tell how recent that information was. Your client will tell you the current state of the torrent if you know how to read it.

Well, the icon beside it when I search for it is a page with a green arrow going into it (or possibly you meant on my end, which is a grey circle). That's another interesting point, actually - when I tried to restart it by opening it again, the symbol changed to two parallel vertical blue lines, although it still didn't download. The torrent says it has 42 seeders and 340 downloaders, and the information was apparently refreshed at 08:45 on 13/07/2006 (today).