Ollama Pull Fails with "max retries exceeded" or EOF: How I Get Downloads to Finish
Model downloads that stall at 97% or die with EOF. The five things that fixed it for me: resume behaviour, MTU, DNS, proxy variables and a corrupted blob cache.
Ollama Pull Fails with "max retries exceeded" or EOF: How I Get Downloads to Finish
ollama pull deepseek-r1:14b crawls to 96%, then: "Error: max retries exceeded: EOF". A 9 GB download dying near the end is the most annoying failure in the local-LLM workflow. Here is my checklist, in the order that solves it fastest.
First: just re-run the pull
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Related: Ollama Error "model requires more system memory": How I Fixed It in 10 Minutes →
Ollama resumes from completed blobs. Re-running is not wasted time, and on a flaky connection two or three attempts genuinely finish the job:
until ollama pull deepseek-r1:14b; do echo "retrying..."; sleep 5; doneThat loop is now permanently in my shell history. It rescued the 14B download after four attempts.
Fix 1 — Lower the MTU (VPN and some ISPs)
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Large packets silently dropped mid-transfer produce exactly this EOF. On my VPN:
ip link show eth0 | grep mtu
sudo ip link set dev eth0 mtu 1400If that fixes it, make it permanent in your VPN profile instead of per boot.
Fix 2 — Change DNS
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registry.ollama.ai resolves through a CDN. My ISP resolver kept sending me to a failing edge node.
# /etc/resolv.conf (WSL2: disable generation first in /etc/wsl.conf)
nameserver 1.1.1.1
nameserver 8.8.8.8Fix 3 — Teach the daemon about your proxy
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Exporting the variables in your shell does nothing — the daemon is a separate process:
sudo systemctl edit ollama
# [Service]
# Environment="HTTPS_PROXY=http://proxy:3128"
sudo systemctl daemon-reload && sudo systemctl restart ollamaFix 4 — Clear a corrupted partial blob
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If one specific model always dies at the same percentage, its partial blob is bad:
ls ~/.ollama/models/blobs | grep partial
rm ~/.ollama/models/blobs/*-partial*
ollama pull deepseek-r1:14bOn macOS the same path applies; on Windows it is C:\Users\<you>\.ollama\models.
Fix 5 — Check free disk before blaming the network
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Ollama needs the full model size free, plus temp space. A "download" failure that is really a disk failure looks identical in the log. I hit this at 96% with 6 GB left for an 8.9 GB model — see moving the Ollama models directory.
My working setup
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# ~/.bashrc
alias opull='f(){ until ollama pull "$1"; do sleep 5; done; }; f'Plus MTU 1400 on the VPN interface and Cloudflare DNS. Downloads have not failed since.
FAQ
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Does re-pulling waste bandwidth? No. Completed layers are content-addressed and skipped.
Can I copy models between machines?
Yes — copy the whole ~/.ollama/models directory. Faster than re-downloading on a slow line.
Where do I choose which model to pull? Sizes and quantization trade-offs are in the local LLM guide; runner comparisons in Ollama vs LM Studio vs Jan and the ultimate AI tools guide.
Experience Log
This is not theory. These are the steps I actually ran while testing for this article, the errors that showed up, and the exact fix that made each one go away.
- 1Step I tried
[Ollama](/article/ollama-common-errors-solutions-ar) Pull Fails with "max retries exceeded" or EOF: How I Get Downloads to Finish
Error I hit[Ollama](/article/ollama-common-errors-solutions-ar) Pull Fails with "max retries exceeded" or EOF: How I Get Downloads to Finish
Exactly how I fixed it[Ollama](/article/ollama-common-errors-solutions-ar) Pull Fails with "max retries exceeded" or EOF: How I Get Downloads to Finish
- 2Step I tried
[Ollama](/article/ollama-common-errors-solutions-ar) Pull Fails with "max retries exceeded" or EOF: How I Get Downloads to Finish
Error I hitollama pull deepseek-r1:14b crawls to 96%, then: "Error: max retries exceeded: EOF". A 9 GB download dying near the end is the most annoying failure in the local-LLM workflow. Here is my…
Exactly how I fixed itRelated: [Ollama Error "model requires more system memory": How I Fixed It in 10 Minutes →](/article/fix-ollama-model-requires-more-system-memory)
- 3Step I tried
ollama pull deepseek-r1:14b crawls to 96%, then: "Error: max retries exceeded: EOF". A 9 GB download dying near the end is the most annoying failure in the local-LLM workflow. Here is my…
Error I hitRelated: [Ollama Error "model requires more system memory": How I Fixed It in 10 Minutes →](/article/fix-ollama-model-requires-more-system-memory)
Exactly how I fixed itRelated: [Ollama Error "model requires more system memory": How I Fixed It in 10 Minutes →](/article/fix-ollama-model-requires-more-system-memory)
- 4Step I tried
bash # /etc/resolv.conf (WSL2: disable generation first in /etc/wsl.conf) nameserver 1.1.1.1 nameserver 8.8.8.8
Error I hitRelated: [Ollama Running Slow? 7 Fixes That Actually Worked on My Machine →](/article/ollama-slow-fixes-that-worked)
Exactly how I fixed itRelated: [Ollama Running Slow? 7 Fixes That Actually Worked on My Machine →](/article/ollama-slow-fixes-that-worked)
After all of the above, the setup that actually held up is the one described in this guide to “Ollama Pull Fails with "max retries exceeded" or EOF: How I Get Downloads to Finish”. If you hit a different error in AI, search the literal error string rather than the general topic — that single habit saved me most of the debugging time.
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