Little Doubt. Help Please!

[charlierodriguez]

Hi Guys!

I'm downloading a very important big sized file (It's a music software - 14,29 GB) and it look likes it's going OK. But when i go to the location where this file will be created I see 4 files .ISO (temp files, right?), and it says "BitComet couldn't complete the download of this file" in the Tab Type of all them. Is there anything wrong? Or is it normal? Shouldn't the size of this temp files be increasing? Sorry but I havent ever used this software before. I'd really appreciate your help!!

Thanks so much!!

[The UnUsual Suspect]

We have a list of basic info we need to process your support request. Please read the topic "READ THIS before posting", and someone will reply to you.

What I can tell you now is that an .iso file is a disc image, meant to be burned onto a cd/dvd disc, or you can open it in a virtual cd/dvd drive if you have one installed.

Also, it could take some time to complete a download that size, so if your showing activity on the tasks, then it is probably working, but we don't have enough info to give you a definite answer.

[kluelos]

It does depend on your settings, and there are two schools of thought about this. One, which is the default, is to have BitComet allocate all of the space that it will eventually need for the file, when the transfer begins.

This has the advantage of letting you know immediately if you don't have enough room to hold the eventual full download, so that you can do something about that first. If BitComet can't allocate enough disk space under this option, it won't start the transfer.

The other is to have BitComet only allocate as much space as it actually needs right now, and to gradually "grow" the file as more of it is downloaded. This is not as straightforward as it seems, though. Most other protocols transfer a file sequentially -- from beginning to middle to end. Bittorrent doesn't do that. It divides the transfer into many evenly-sized pieces, and those pieces are not transferred in any particular order. The file's growth is not going to be orderly.

That method has the advantage, if it's going to take you some time to clear up enough space (burn things to optical disk, then delete them from your hard disk, for example) of still proceeding with the transfer while you do it. However, you have to manage your disk space yourself and you do have to free up enough disk space before BitComet needs it.

With method 1, the file size won't grow. With method 2, it will.

Another option is to change the file's extension. BitComet tacks the extra extension, ".!bc" onto files that haven't been fully downloaded yet. This makes them easy to identify and to sort. When they're fully downloaded, the extra extension is removed. If you don't use this, you have to manually check that a file has been fully downloaded before you try to use it.

All of these things are explained in the settings guide which can be found in the Guides forum.