Followup to disk space problem
The other day I posted about some problems with iTunes downloads, where iTunes insisted on throwing an “err = -34″ whenever I tried to download stuff from the iTunes store. iTunes said that there was not enough disk space for the download to complete. The disk in question had more than 800GB available.
After some back-and-forth with the support staff at Apple (who, by the way, were pretty fast with their responses), I ended up at some higher level support person who told me that Apple does not support iTunes catalogs on network disks. Say what? One of the main reasons why I bought the LaCie 1TB Ethernet disk was to have a common storage area for all my media files and that includes the iTunes catalog. The last response from Apple said that I should move all my files over to a disk that is attached to my Mac and then reimport the library.
My bullshit-light started flashing red after I heard this. In the past 25 years (since I started using computers) I’ve been in way too many situations where the operating system or an application uses the wrong data-structures to hold information about a disk’s free space. I think the first time I saw it on an Amiga 1000 after attaching a 20GB external third-party disk. The OS did not think it would ever see more than xx GB and as a result it showed a negative number where one would have expected the real free disk space. The solution at that point was to partition the disk into several smaller chunks with each chunk being less than xx GB.
Fast forward to April 2007 and it looks like I’m seeing the same problem again. This time it is either a bug in iTunes or the AFP-client (which is used to connect to the LaCie Ethernet disk). Did not want to repartition the disk and decided to use a different strategy. So if iTunes thinks there’s not enough space, then let’s reduce the space even further to a level where the free-space-calculation works correctly again.
I went to a Terminal window and typed:
$ cd /Volumes/share $ mkfile 100G foo
The “cd” brought me to the mount-point of my big disk and the “mkfile” command creates an empty file. The “100G” specifies the size of the empty file and in this case it means 100 GB. After waiting a while for the command to complete, I restarted iTunes, went to the iTunes store and restarted the downloads. And this time it completed without any complaints or more “err = -34″ messages.
There is even an easier method to fix this. Go into the iTunes Music Downloads directory and move to the trash all files that end with .tmp. Then restart iTunes and the downloads will start properly.
so in a nut shell, i have the same problem but im into computers but not enough to understand how to do the terminal window other than to “google it” but yeah and i dont know where the itunes music downloads directory is
i deleted a massive amount of songs and movies/videos i dont watch/listen to anymore, and i still have “not enough room on the disk” so i think its reading wrong (duh!) so how do i fix it! iv had the problem since trying to download my first movie, but i just ended up living with out itunes downloaded movies (and its cheaper and faster) but id rather get some of my stuff from there…so pretty much i dont know how to fix my problem. anyone know how to help?