Problems attempting to make a torrent

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Hello all,

I'm a new member here and havent really got the hang of this torrent thing yet, this query may have been asked before on this site but I wouldnt recognise the solution if its already been posted so if you would please bear with me.

Techy bits: Im currently using

BitComet V1.09

ADSL / modem

Win XP (SP3)/ Zonealarm 8.0.065 / Avast 4.8 Home

Ok, heres what I did, this was my first attempt to try and upload a torrent. I had some .mp3 files of a BBC Radio4 detective drama called McLevy that I was going to attempt to upload to a site so a friend in America could hear them

I opened the bitcomet v1.09 program and then went to

file > make torrent

when the torrent maker pop up appeared I selected

general tab > Directory (multifiles)

and then browsed through to the audio folder where I kept the .mp3 files I wanted to convert to a torrent for uploading, which I then selected.

D:\My Music\ITunes\Spoken Word\BBC\McLevy\McLevy - Series 5

On the pop up the following boxes were ticked by default

Add DHT, Align File, Enable search, Calculate ED2k

in the output box the generated file would be

D:\My Music\ITunes\Spoken Word\BBC\McLevy\McLevy - Series 5.torrent

I then clicked on make torrent, which it then did and the torrent appeared on the bitcomet page

however the original folder containing the .MP3 files disappeared and in my bitcomet download folder one appeared containing the same audio files only with the file extension .bc!

on the bitcomet programme it displayed 0 % progress and seed/peer/all as 0/0/1

As I thought you had to make your torrent before you could send it to the website I was a bit suprised when this happened so I stopped and went back to see where i had gone wrong only to find that the audio folder containing my original files was no longer present and had been replaced by this file

McLevy - Series 5.torrent

Using windows search I looked for the original source files but could only find the .bc! files in the bitcomet download folder, the .torrent file in the original audio folder and another copy of the same torrent file and a .xml file in

C:\Program files\Bitcomet\torrents

so my questions are....

where are my original source files?

how can i get them back?

if i can, could somebody help me do this properly?

please contact me either via this reply or via [deleted by Mod]hotmail.com asap as I dont want to lose these files if i can help it

heres hoping

Edited January 8, 2010 by cassie
posting you private e-mail is not very wise, on a public forum... (see edit history)

[kluelos]

You more-or-less did everything correctly, or close enough.

When you load a new torrent file, and don't tell the client otherwise, it's going to assume that you want to download those files just like always. It will create blank filenames to receive the content, and if so configured, will reserve sufficient blank space on the disk. It will do this in your default download directory. If so configured it will create the files with the additional incomplete extension.

So far, so good.

BC will not, absent other commands, do anything at all with the source files. Once the torrent is made and saved it will forget that those files are even there.

Think about this for a moment as, not your own torrent, but someone else's that you just downloaded and are starting normally.

It makes the zero-length files to store the coming download in, that process you're quite familiar with.

Now let's suppose that, elsewhere on your drive or on another volume, you happen to have exactly the material which you are in the process of transferring. This is because of accident, error, or because you're testing. In any event, the material already exists elsewhere on your system

BitComet will not know anything about that other copy.

BC has no way of finding out. BC doesn't check your disks to see if that material exists already. BC won't do anything to that other copy. BC will remain oblivious to it and proceed with its own download.

This is exactly the situation that you have here. BC finished making the torrent, you stored the torrent file somewhere, that's that task done done. Now it's a new world. You (or BC for you) loads the torrent into BC.

Brand-new torrent, ho! BC looks at the default download directory, doesn't find any complete or partially-complete files of the same name in that directory, so starts downloading.

While that wasn't quite what you wanted, neither was it a terrible or unrecoverable error. Stop the task.

Your job now is to find the original files that you made the torrent with. "Well, duh!", you're thinking. I'm thinking it right back at you. BitComet would not have moved or deleted those files. It follows that either you did, or that they're still there.

Have you looked in the recycle bin? Have you got someone else who can look for them for you? (This is frequently good practice, when you're too upset to be sure you're not being dense.) Odds are, though, that they are still present, and that you aren't seeing them there.

So delete the "task and all downloaded files" from BitComet. (That's the new download you started by mistake.) Now using the file menu, load the .torrent file but set it to download later. Don't leave this dialogue yet.

Now change the "download" directory, which is going to be the upload directory but the terminology doesn't change, to point to the directory where the source files were. Good odds that you will see your files in there, and be ready to swear that you must be going periodically blind or something. It happens.

Ok, now point to one directory level above that.

Play with this a while, you'll get the hang of it. If I want to seed all the files in the Myfiles subfolder in D:\Mydir\Myfiles as a directory, then the place I have to point to is C:\MyDir, and not D:\Mydir\Myfiles.

Myfiles does not contain Myfiles.

Mydir contains Myfiles.

This actually does make sense if you ponder it a while. And incidentally, other clients don't necessarily do it that way.

Click ok and back out, leaving the task set to "download LATER". Now right-click on the task and perform a manual hash check. This is to make certain that you're pointing to the right place. If you ARE, then the hash check will immediately go to zero and slowly climb back to 100%, then stay there. It should take a few minutes, as BC hash-checks the files.

If it does NOT, if the count stays at 0% and doesn't grow, then the download directory is not pointing to the right place -- BitComet can't find the content files in the current download directory. Try again until you get it right.

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In the meantime and otherwise: I strongly advise you to uninstall and discard ZoneAlarm. There are several free firewalls that are much better behaved, and ZA is notorious for causing grief with P2P and many other things.