RESOLVED: No Block Download, Help!!

[mintymark]

My Client, 0.5.2 Beta, stopped downloading blocks 3 days ago, and has not moved since.

(Prior to that it was working well. )
Hovering over the spinner says Downloaded 169373 of 169822 blocks of transaction history, Last received block was generated 3 days ago.

Hovering over the wi-fi type icon says 15 Active connections.

What I have tried:

1) Restart of bitcoin, doing File -> Quit.
2) Restart of computer, running Ubuntu 10.04.
3) -rescan
4) -debug , reveals this type of things in the debug file:

<pre>
AddAddress(131.104.40.171:8333)
accepted connection 109.255.169.120:55812
Added time data, samples 18, offset +0 (+0 minutes)
version message: version 32300, blocks=169823
askfor tx 1892ec5ba4076cb7afb6   0
sending getdata: tx 1892ec5ba4076cb7afb6
ERROR: ConnectInputs() : 1892ec5ba4 mapTransactions prev not found 3088d5cb26
ERROR: AcceptToMemoryPool() : ConnectInputs failed 1892ec5ba4
storing orphan tx 1892ec5ba4
askfor tx 206524bd7c166e940d1f   0
sending getdata: tx 206524bd7c166e940d1f
askfor tx 206524bd7c166e940d1f   1330996863000000
ERROR: ConnectInputs() : 206524bd7c mapTransactions prev not found 733d22d4fc
ERROR: AcceptToMemoryPool() : ConnectInputs failed 206524bd7c
storing orphan tx 206524bd7c
askfor tx d9d9a8dc158d01ce0db1   0
sending getdata: tx d9d9a8dc158d01ce0db1
ERROR: ConnectInputs() : d9d9a8dc15 mapTransactions prev not found 4b81a0e789
ERROR: AcceptToMemoryPool() : ConnectInputs failed d9d9a8dc15
storing orphan tx d9d9a8dc15
</pre>

Does anyone have any clue what is going on ? Or advice on how to find out.

[mintymark]

Still experiancing this.

What else could I try? Delete some files in ~/.bitcoin apart from wallet.dat. All files except wallet.dat?

I would really like to keep my address history/list

Remove all files relating to blockchain download and reload it. How do I do that?

Does anyone have any suggestions ?

[Raoul Duke]

Delete everything besides the wallet.dat and addr.dat
You can maybe leave the bitcoin.conf file also.

If it gets stuck on the same place then you have a problem.

[deepceleron]

The first thing I would do is determine if the problem lies with network connectivity or a Bitcoin database problem. This can be quickly determined by completely closing Bitcoin (or even better, disabling the option "Start Bitcoin on window system startup" and restarting the machine), rename the Bitcoin data directory, and restart Bitcoin. This will create a new wallet, empty blockchain, and reset settings to default.

Here are commands to rename the Bitcoin data directory in a terminal window:

$cd (change to home directory)
$ls -la (verify that you see the .bitcoin directory in this directory listing)
$mv .bitcoin .bitcoin-backup (rename the bitcoin data directory)
$ls -la (verify it was renamed)

Now run Bitcoin. It will create a new .bitcoin directory when it runs. You should start getting connections and the block count should start increasing shortly. If it does not start downloading blocks, than you have some networking problem, such as connections being partially blocked, corrupted program install, etc.

If Bitcoin starts downloading blocks again with the fresh data directory, likely the blockchain data files have corruption, although first we should check if permissions were altered on your bitcoin data files. In the the new test .bitcoin directory look at the permissions and owner of the blkindex.dat and blk0001.dat - compare that your backup's directory's permissions and owner on these files, they should be the same.

If a new blank data directory works, and the permissions look correct on your old directory, then likely the blockchain is corrupted. You can then close Bitcoin completely, rename the "test" directory from .bitcoin to .bitcoin-blank, and put back your .bitcoin-backup as .bitcoin again. Delete the blkindex.dat file, blk0001.dat, and any files in the database subdirectory. You can then either restart Bitcoin and let it download the whole blockchain again for a day, or download and use the direct-download blockchain files as outlined here.

[mintymark]

Thanks! I am in the process of trying what psy suggested, and blocks are being downloaded. As noted, its a slow process!!

I'll report what happened.

I am thinking it was perhaps a simple file corruption problem caused by attempting to run an old version of bitcoind.

[mintymark]

That seemed to work with no problems. Thanks guys!