diff --git a/transformers/modeling_tf_utils.py b/transformers/modeling_tf_utils.py
index 6c48f3eed2a..95c29693d85 100644
--- a/transformers/modeling_tf_utils.py
+++ b/transformers/modeling_tf_utils.py
@@ -265,8 +265,10 @@ class TFPreTrainedModel(tf.keras.Model):
                         pretrained_model_name_or_path))
             elif os.path.isfile(pretrained_model_name_or_path):
                 archive_file = pretrained_model_name_or_path
+            elif os.path.isfile(pretrained_model_name_or_path + ".index"):
+                archive_file = pretrained_model_name_or_path + ".index"
             else:
-                raise EnvironmentError("Error file {} not found".format(pretrained_model_name_or_path))
+                archive_file = pretrained_model_name_or_path
 
             # redirect to the cache, if necessary
             try:
diff --git a/transformers/modeling_utils.py b/transformers/modeling_utils.py
index 398172a88c5..eec9034fd7c 100644
--- a/transformers/modeling_utils.py
+++ b/transformers/modeling_utils.py
@@ -364,9 +364,12 @@ class PreTrainedModel(nn.Module):
                         pretrained_model_name_or_path))
             elif os.path.isfile(pretrained_model_name_or_path):
                 archive_file = pretrained_model_name_or_path
-            else:
-                assert from_tf, "Error finding file {}, no file or TF 1.X checkpoint found".format(pretrained_model_name_or_path)
+            elif os.path.isfile(pretrained_model_name_or_path + ".index"):
+                assert from_tf, "We found a TensorFlow checkpoint at {}, please set from_tf to True to load from this checkpoint".format(
+                    pretrained_model_name_or_path + ".index")
                 archive_file = pretrained_model_name_or_path + ".index"
+            else:
+                archive_file = pretrained_model_name_or_path
 
             # redirect to the cache, if necessary
             try: