Something wrong at Digital River ?

wumbatron said:

Downloaded it on another computer and it only downloaded 2.49GB for some reason

I've been following the above thread where a guy kept trying to download a Windows 7 iso from Digital River, and it was wrong size/'not an iso' etc. Even though I don't need any iso's myself, I thought I'd have a go at downloading one to see what the OP's problem was. Sure enough I had the same result - 2.49GB (not 3.09GB for x64). Twice in fact.

That was browser download, so I tried 2 separate download managers. Seemed fine at first, but both stopped at 99.9%. Curious . . .

I'm starting to wonder if Microsoft are playing the old 'poison torrent' game - record labels sometimes release bad torrents of music CDs into the wild and fans download them (illegally) but are disappointed when it's a fake. After a few more useless attempts to get the CD, the pirate gives up and buys the product (well that's the theory).

Pretty soon all computers on sale will be Windows 8, and a lot of folk will buy one but want to downgrade to W7. MS seem to be moving the goalposts on that scenario, but no probs - we can just get a W7 iso from Digital River. Or can we ???

Just like the 'poison torrents', after several failed W7 Digital River downloads I guess MS expect us all to give up and buy into W8 (and buy their video's + mp3's).

Anyhow, at least I haven't broken any EULA law - all the iso's I downloaded tonight weren't copies of Windows. They were all broken, probably deliberately.

Jed, tinfoil hat etc

You can remove your tin foil hat - sort of.

I used Pale Moon to download the ISO mentioned in the thread and it was fine
(e.g. I could mount it via Virtual CloneDrive and look around at the files...
...I could also build a virtual machine from it via VirtualBox.).

I also downloaded two other ISOs at the same time. One was fine, but X17-59465 was weird.


The last ISO in the screenshot above should be that same size as the first ISO.


X17-59465.iso looked fine.
I could mount it via Virtual CloneDrive.
I could even start the OS install process, but it barfed:











Notice the size being reported during the download.
That download was the 3rd try.
The completed download below it was 2nd try.





And these two download attempts were via another ISP:



Both of those downloads were via IE10. Both claimed that the download was interrupted. I looked at the file size of the ".partial" file before hitting the Resume button. The ".partial" file was the same exact file size (2.619...) shown in the first image of this post. Pressing Resume started the download all over again - but the "resumed" download made no claim of an interruption. Each second try just gave me the 2.619... file.

How odd.

Official Windows 7 SP1 ISO Image Downloads | Windows 7 Forums

latest downloads

The first post has links to pre-SP1 ISO files. How is that the latest?

I did scan thru the first page and saw the links to MDLife... but all of these links just copies. They all point to Digital River.

A quick scan of the last few pages of that thread shows some bad advice.

johnebadbak said:

Official Windows 7 SP1 ISO Image Downloads | Windows 7 Forums

latest downloads

Nope, they're missing the media refresh fixes. Latest downloads are the X17-5... series.

More here: Windows 7 ISO downloads links down again for 5 days

I just posted about this at the MVP internal communications channel where it might get some traction as it seemed to do last time.

The failure page which Ken posted above is the same as last time, pointing to who is withholding them.