“No metadata arrived in time”

The full message is:

No metadata arrived in time — the torrent may be dead or have no reachable peers.

Before it can download anything, gettor has to ask the swarm what the torrent contains. This failure means nobody answered within the time limit.

The usual causes

• The torrent is old and has no seeders left. This is by far the most common reason.
• The magnet link was copied incompletely, so the hash does not match anything real.
• The torrent is private and only reachable through a tracker that requires an account.

What to try

1. 1Check the seeder count wherever you found the link. Zero seeders means there is nothing to fetch, and no client can change that.
2. 2Re-copy the magnet link and compare the end of it — truncation is easy to miss.
3. 3If you have a .torrent file for the same content, add that instead. It carries the metadata with it and skips this step.

“The download made no progress for too long”

The file list arrived but the bytes stopped — the swarm has peers, just none that will send you data.

The full message is:

The download made no progress for too long — no reachable seeds.

This one appears after the metadata has already arrived, so the torrent is real and its file list is known. What stopped is the data itself.

Why it happens

A torrent can have peers without having anyone holding the pieces you still need. Partial seeders are common on old torrents: between them they have most of the content, but the last few percent exists nowhere. gettor gives it a generous window and then stops rather than holding capacity indefinitely.

What to try

• Look at the seeds and peers figures on the card before it failed. A healthy torrent shows seeds, not only peers.
• Try again later. Seeders come and go, and a torrent that stalls at midnight sometimes completes the next day.
• Find a better-seeded copy of the same content if one exists.