277157 - Silent download failure / weird behavior when browser.download.dir and browser.download.defaultFolder set to invalid path / non-existent drive / partition

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 270557

(Toolkit :: Downloads API, defect)

Description

[Jay Sheth]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

Summary of problem:
Suppose you have two hard drive partitions, C:\ and D:\. 
In Firefox, you go to Tools|Options|Downloads. You set your download directory
to 'D:\downloads' .
Then you remove the D parition, leaving you with just the C:\ partition. Then
you try to download a file, by clicking on a link that points to a file such as
http://www.somewhere.com/program.exe . Firefox will not download the file, and
the download will silently fail.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
Steps to reproduce:

1) Start Firefox
2) Set download directory to a valid path, such as C:\downloads
3) Verify that you can download a file correctly
4) Then type about:config in the address bar
5) Search for 'down' in the about:config search bar
6) Modify the values of browser.download.dir and browser.download.defaultFolder
to an invalid path. For example, assuming the drive O: is not mapped, set the
values as follows:

browser.download.dir - O:\downloads
browser.download.defaultFolder - O:\downloads
7) Then try to redownload the file you successfully downloaded in step 3. 
8) Press Control + J to bring up the Download Manager. This will verify that no
downloads have begun and that the download silently failed.

Alternative steps to reproduce related bug:
1) Start Firefox
2) Set download directory to a valid path, such as C:\downloads
3) Verify that you can download a file correctly
4) Then type about:config in the address bar
5) Search for 'down' in the about:config search bar
6) Only modify the value of browser.download.dir as follows:

browser.download.dir - O:\downloads
7) Then try to redownload the file you successfully downloaded in step 3. 
8) Press Control + J to bring up the Download Manager. The download will have
begun, but it will not be saved anywhere.
9) Additionally, the icon next to the status bar text of the Download Manager
will have a broken icon. Clicking on the folder name produces no error and no
folder comes up.

Actual Results:  
The download fails silently, or (in the second senario) appears to be
progressing successfully, when in fact it will not be saved to disk. The user
gets no error message at all and has no idea as to why the downloads are failing.

Expected Results:  
File should be saved correctly, or if there the download path is set to an
invalid directory / non-existent partition (drive), the Firefox should product
an error message, and let the user choose a new, valid download directory.

Additional Note:
The full download path should be shown in the Download Manager status bar
Error checking should be added in to see if the download paths set in the config
file are valid. If they are not, the user should be alerted and given an
opportunity to change them

Comment 1

[OstGote!]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 270557 ***