ITunes wil not download iTunes Store purchases to my network drive

Question

I have iTunes 8.2.1.6 loaded. I can't remember when the last upgrade came through and not sure when the downloads to my network drive stopped working, but they used to work.
I first set-up iTunes on my Win XP laptop in January 2008. I already had my network set-up at home and had been storing my music and media on a network drive for long before that. Initially everything was fine, iTunes connected and created the library. It also allowed me to download from the store directly to my mapped network drive.
The library still works and still picks up all the music and media from my network drive. The problem is, whenever I try to purchase from iTunes Store, the download fails and says the disk is full (it's not - there's 70GB left on it). If I set my iTunes Music Folder location to be local C: drive, it downloads with no issue. Problem is I only have between 2 and 5GB left on my C: drive and it's only a 30GB drive to begin with, so way too small for my library.
Recently (July) I purchased a TV Episode from iTunes Store. It tried to download 6 separate instances, every one failed. When I switched my iTunes Music Folder location to C:, it finally downloaded. I switched my folder location back to the network on completion and manually moved the TV episode to the network (it was a HD+SD download, so multiple copies, and the meta data / library entry now seems to be screwed!).
Today I have tried to download an album and I get the same error about the network disk being full! This is too much hassle and not endearing me in anyway to Apple!
If anyone has any ideas as to how I might resolve this, I'd be very grateful.
Cheers

Answer 1

I am having a similar problem for 3 weeks now, and wasted hours messing with our Firewall software, etc. thinking that was the problem. Thanks to your post I tried changing the Itunes Music Folder location temporarily to our C: drive, and voila-- suddenly downloads can be completed. We choose to keep our Itunes library folder on a separate networked hard drive, and ever since we updated to Itunes 8.2.1.6 we've been unable to download purchased music to this drive. We had no problems for the last 2 years with previous versions of Itunes & our preference configurations for the library. The error message I got when I tried to download purchased content (both music & video) was "error (-48) unknown error. unable to complete download... check network connection and try again". Of course our PC WAS connected to the internet, and I could access the Store and download from other websites, just not Itunes.
Could this be related?? : Looking in my Itunes folder in the networked drive, I tried to delete the Downloads folder (after reading a suggestion in a forum to delete purchased music files if they were partially downloaded, and then try to download them again). I have been unable to delete or rename this folder, getting this error message: "Cannot delete Downloads. The file or directory is corrupted & unreadable".
A separate, Itunes bug related to Music Folder location-- we also had a major problem trying to get the location of all our music properly identified in Itunes library with this latest software version. We had to wipe our C: hard-drive due to a virus, and when we downloaded the updated Itunes software & set the preferences to point to the library on our networked drive, it isn't properly identifying thousands of the files (we have ~10,000 songs. The "Consolidate files" feature is very buggy, and only worked for maybe 1/5 of the files before stopping. We don't want to keep trying to run it, because we are afraid we'll end up with even more duplicate "ghost" files than we have now ("Unable to locate file" under "Get info" the "where" field is blank. We've had to manually load folders from the networked hard drive one by one, using the
"Add Folder to Library" feature. This is taking forever, as this needs to be done for 100's of artist folders, then we have to delete the duplicate music files that still appear in the library!!
Info on our computer:
OS Name Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
Version 5.1.2600 Service Pack 2 Build 2600
OS Manufacturer Microsoft Corporation
System Manufacturer Gateway
System Model MS-6741
System Type X86-based PC
Processor x86 Family 15 Model 12 Stepping 0 AuthenticAMD ~2400 Mhz
BIOS Version/Date American Megatrends Inc. Version 07.00T, 4/2/2001
SMBIOS Version 2.3
Windows Directory C:\WINDOWS
System Directory C:\WINDOWS\system32
Boot Device \Device\HarddiskVolume1
Locale United States
Hardware Abstraction Layer Version = "5.1.2600.2180 (xpspsp2rtm.040803-2158)"
User Name STHCPA-GAILS\Owner
Time Zone Eastern Daylight Time
Total Physical Memory 2,048.00 MB
Available Physical Memory 1.18 GB
Total Virtual Memory 2.00 GB
Available Virtual Memory 1.96 GB
Page File Space 3.78 GB
Page File C:\pagefile.sys