Doesn't rename .part extention after download
Frequently Firefox 4 (betas and now RC) gives an error message that it can't save a file after downloading it. What actually happens is that after the download is complete it doesn't rename the file to eliminate the .part extension. If I manually rename the file it is fine. There is nothing wrong with the downloaded file, it just couldn't be renamed.
This does not happen all the time. Tried disabling add-ons, no effect. Allowed Firefox through Win 7 firewall. That helped, I think, but it's an intermittent problem so it's hard to be sure. But I was uncomfortable allowing a browser to bypass the firewall. Seemed risky.
All Replies (8)
Allowing Firefox through the firewall did not fix the problem. It persists.
Did you check the settings in your anti-virus software as well because it may have locked the file for inspection ?
It is possible that your anti-virus software is corrupting the downloaded files or otherwise interfering with downloading files by Firefox. Try to disable the real-time (live) scanning of files in your anti-virus software temporarily to see if that makes downloading work.
See:
Well thank you. I tried it as a test and it worked. Disabling my CA eTrust Realtime Monitoring did allow a successful download. Interesting, after downloading, the Firefox download manager still indicated the file was being scanned. Hmm...
The dilemma is, of course, that I don't want to leave it disabled, or manually disable it on prior to each download. So, is there another option? Is it that Firefox and eTrust just don't get along?
Firefox will pass the files to the default anti-virus program after the download has finished. If programs start scanning while Firefox is still downloading the file then you get this problem. Firefox closes the file after adding a block to prevent dataloss in case of problems and that may make the AV program believe that Firefox has finished downloading. Can you add the Firefox program as trusted to that software?
That did not work, assuming I did it correctly. eTrust allows me to exclude certain processes and directories from real-time scanning. I did, and got the same error message.
I'm not sure, even if it worked, that I'd want to do that, however. I do want downloads scanned.
Also, I thought I could turn off browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone in about:config. Since eTrust is scanning it anyway, why do I need a second scan by Firefox? But that didn't work either.
I have IE9 and Chrome installed. They both work, but I still prefer Firefox.
I finally have fixed this problem -- avoided it really -- by installing Free Download Manager. It may be overkill, but it works very, very well.
3.8 Beta works great with FF6 on my Win 7 machine.
OK, now I have finally, finally fixed this problem. I got rid of Free Download Manager. It was slick, but overkill for simple downloads. I went back to the native Firefox download manager and did the following...
The problem was indeed that the anti-virus would try to scan the temporary .part file before it was fully written. This created a conflict as two programs fought over access to the same file. So I set my anti-virus to exclude files with a .part extension. The file is still scanned, however, after the download completed and the extension gets changed to .exe
Works fine now.