I've been working on downloading a FC5 DVD. Normally wget is a great tool for this, but this time I'm confused.

I first used I went to do other stuff and when I came back expecting it to have finished, it had aborted after downloading quite a bit. The target is the FC5 DVD ISO, which is listed as 3177412 KB, so I figured I was almost home. A quick study of the manpage affirmed what I remembered: It resumed the download, but was somehow "counting backwards." To my astonishment, the file size grew to 5.2 GB before I had to shut down for the night (poor wife).

In the meantime, I downloaded the DVD on the LAN connection at work, checked the SHA1 sum and burned it, but when I went to use it no media is recognized. Nero express...

So I'm downloading again, hoping it doesn't abort. Here's the output so far:
[code]$ wget ftp://mirror.switch.ch/mirror/fedora/linux/core/5/i386/iso/FC-5-i386-DVD.iso
--10:10:44-- ftp://mirror.switch.ch/mirror/fedora/linux/core/5/i386/iso/FC-5-i386-DVD.iso
=> `FC-5-i386-DVD.iso'
Resolving mirror.switch.ch... 130.59.10.35, 130.59.10.34
Connecting to mirror.switch.ch[130.59.10.35]:21... connected.
Logging in as anonymous ... Logged in!
==> SYST ... done. ==> PWD ... done.
==> TYPE I ... done. ==> CWD /mirror/fedora/linux/core/5/i386/iso ... done.
==> PASV ... done. ==> RETR FC-5-i386-DVD.iso ... done.
Length: -1,041,297,408 (unauthoritative)
[ <=> ] 1,088,234,043 518.43K/s[code]

Did I make a mistake using wget -c? It seems more likely to me that the download was aborted due to some corruption. I guess I assumed wget would handle that and write over the corrupted part. Wishful thinking?

What I really don't understand is why it would count backwards, showing a progress bar something like:
[++++++++++++<=======================]

. . . and why it would create a 5.2+ GB file when the target is only about 3.4 GB.

Any ideas?

Nope, aborted again. What's with the negative number of bytes: -1,041,297,408 ?

Edit: Maybe I should mention that this is under Debian Sarge, though I guess that dosen't matter.

Edit: Sorry, double post

I can't tell you why it's counting backwards, etc., but wget is not the program to use for downloads that large.

Try "rsync" if available from that mirror, or Downloader for X, or the FlashGot plugin with Mozilla Firefox will use a program available on your system. Mine uses cUrl, which is also preferable to wget.

From experience, I have never been able to get a good download of an image that large with wget.

negative? maybe it's the problem of wget. are you sure you're using the new versions of wget? i've heard that older versions of wget has had problems downloading large files.