Slipped Clutch; Blew Transmission

Haha!  Oh, how I love breaking things.  It’s a how-to for fixing them.

I didn’t like the fact that I had a drive without a name (officially it was named “disk” and when it was mounted it appeared as “160 GB Disk” or some such).  I wanted to give it a name.

I opened GParted, unmounted the drive, and renamed it:

  1. System —> Administration —> Partition Editor
  2. You will be asked to enter your password
  3. Select the drive from the drop-down at the right of the button bar within the GParted
  4. Be sure you have selected the correct drive or you can really screw things up
  5. Right-click on the partition/drive in question (below the button bar) and choose Unmount
  6. Again, right-click on the partition/drive in question (below the button bar) and this time choose Label
  7. Name the drive whatever you want
  8. Close GParted

This worked wonders.  However, it breaks anything formerly linked to objects on that drive/partition.  This should come as no surprise.  It may come as a bit of a shock that you’ll have to open the hood to fix a couple of these.

I decided the easiest way to remount the drive was to merely reboot.  You may be able to choose the new drive by its new name from your Places menu, but it probably won’t hurt anything to go ahead and reboot as I did.

Now, I use Transmission for BitTorrents.  My BT download folder was located on that newly renamed drive.  When I subsequently opened Transmission it was a little lost, understandably.  So I told Transmission where the download folder was now located.

It basically ignored me.  I mean, in all the places one would care to look Transmission said it was going to use the new location, but when I opened the log file (Help —> Message Log) it was throwing errors which related to the old location (specifically to it not being found).

A little research told me that this information was kept in a file:

  • /home/[username]/.config/transmission/settings.json

I opened that file in a text editor (choose any you’d like) and changed all occurances of the former path to the new path.  Yours might look something like this:

  • OLD: “/media/disk/DownloadFolder”
  • NEW: “/media/TorrentDrive/DownloadFolder”

Sounds basic enough, yes?

Well, it will cause a new kind of havoc.  This is the correct solution, but before you do that (or like me after you’ve done that a few times) you will want to do one other thing:

  1. Copy your current torrent files by right-clicking on /home/[username]/.config/transmission/torrents
  2. Paste a copy of this folder some place safe—I chose my desktop
  3. Remove all torrents from Transmission by right-clicking each or all of them and choosing “Remove
  4. Close Transmission
  5. The Important Step: Now go back and perform the editing steps to change the path as mentioned above
  6. Open Transmission
  7. Some of your torrents may reload themselves, but toss all of the torrent files from the copy we made in step 2 into Transmission (drag and drop works nicely)—the duplicates will not be reloaded
  8. I manually told Transmission to Start and Verify Local Data, but it will likely do both all on its own

Hope you find this time-saving.

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