Corrupt downloads

[jet4571]

This is the second time in a week that I am getting corrupt downloads and other oddities. First time was trying to download the latest Skyrim Closer Quivers and Longer arrows and this time trying to download Omegared99's gallery of armor. Both times WinZip shows ? for ratio and packed. The other oddity is when changing from the files section to description the webpage will change from Skyrims color scheme to Oblivions I think. Both are happening at the same time.

 

Is there a chance to see a warning about download server issues or is there a report button so staff can check on them?

[bluesunmerc]

yes, I am having the same problem with many different mods. Some I can download and then some will continue to say corrupt. I dont think it is entirely the mod manager because I downloaded a couple of mods manually and when I would check the they would be corrupt I thinking it may be an issue with the servers

[bluesunmerc]

yes, I am having the same problem with many different mods. Some I can download and then some will continue to say corrupt. I dont think it is entirely the mod manager because I downloaded a couple of mods manually and when I would check the they would be corrupt I thinking it may be an issue with the servers

nvm its still doing it

Edited March 16, 2014 by bluesunmerc

[DrakeTheDragon]

Corrupt downloads are always an issue with the connection, not with the files or the servers. They're corrupt because the download aborts prematurely, often times even without telling.

 

There's several reports of corrupted or broken downloads per day, and so far not even a single one could be reproduced by staff. We download from random servers, the well-known most fickle servers, through NMM, manually, what have you, and it always works.

 

The only thing you can do when a download resulted in a corrupted file is to rinse and repeat until the file's intact, delete the corrupt one so its remains will not damage the new attempt by unsuccessful overwrite operations and some such.

 

In the past I had a user of my mods report the same to me about one of my files, then I redirected him towards the MediaFire mirror location I used with the exact same result, the file size of the downloaded file always was a couple KB short of the actual size it should've been. We couldn't find any solution that was working for him, uploading the same files again, other files, even trying yet another different file host, nothing helped. So he kept trying and trying and trying, and in the end, after about 50+ or so download attempts, it finally resulted in an intact file he was able to extract and put to use. And he was enjoying it greatly.

 

It could be a fickle connection, some router on half way to the file servers malfunctioning, the wrong choice of server for the route the data must take to reach you, even a temporarily overloaded server itself. I've also witnessed cases where it was the user's browser configured in a strange way that didn't allow to cache downloads big enough for larger files to ever succeed... however that was even possible to begin with. There's no way of telling for sure other than using the fact that it doesn't happen to many others, in order to exclude the file itself or the server in general from being to blame.

 

It's actually rather simple. If there's several posts in the comments saying the mod was working great or there's lots of downloads and quite some endorsements already listed, the file can impossibly be inherently 'broken'. If one succeeded, all can succeed. If it was indeed broken, 'none' would succeed.

 

It's impossible to tell what exactly is the reason for everybody, but whatever it is, it's somewhere between your pcs and the file servers, and it can only be fixed there.

 

The most common advice is to just keep trying. Compare the file sizes and see it always breaks at a different point. Switch servers in order to rule out an overloaded one or a routing problem. Don't just try those near to you, if the error's maybe close by, give the ones further away or on the other end of the world a try as well, you're not really caring about 'speed' at this point anymore anyways.

And most important of all, don't rely on WinZip/WinRAR alone. They're known to be unable to read a select few of the 7-Zip compression formats you find here correctly and as such will give you a false error report, while the file actually could very well be extracted quite fine already simply by using the right app instead, 7-Zip to open '.7z'.