He clicked and resumed the download.
The green bar flickered. Then, like magic, changed to "Connecting..." and then "Downloading – 1 of 1 segment."
But for the last twenty minutes, the progress bar read the same frustrating phrase:
| What to try | Why it works | |-------------|---------------| | | Confirms if the server is alive or if the link is dead/expired. | | Reduce segments to 1 | Some servers panic if you ask for too many pieces at once. | | Spoof a browser User-Agent | Tricks picky servers into thinking you're Chrome, not a download manager. | | Copy a fresh link from your browser | Gets cookies and temporary auth tokens that FDM misses. | | Add a delay (if available) | In FDM settings, add a 5-second delay between connection attempts for rate-limited servers. | free download manager stuck on requesting info
Leo was a designer who worked from his small, sunlit apartment. His internet was usually reliable, but today, a critical 4GB software update was stuck. He used because he loved splitting files into chunks for faster speeds.
By default, FDM uses 8 or 16 "chunks" (simultaneous connections). Some cheap or old servers see this as a mini-attack and refuse to answer the info request.
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 This told the server, "I'm just a regular Chrome browser, nothing to see here!" He clicked and resumed the download
Leo smiled. It worked. But Leo noticed something. The file was now downloading, but slowly—only one chunk at 200 KB/s. The 4GB file would take hours.
He clicked and then Resume .
Leo changed from 8 to 1 .
From that day on, Leo never stared at a frozen progress bar again. He knew that "Requesting info" wasn't a bug—it was just a conversation his download manager hadn't learned how to start. And once he learned to translate, the files flowed freely.
"Requesting info from what ?" Leo muttered, watching the green bar pulse but never advance. He clicked "Pause," then "Resume." Nothing. He restarted FDM. Nothing.