This is a bit of a digression from the norm here, although I haven’t really shown any particular focus on this blog yet, so why start now! I’ve been having an ongoing problem with iTunes and certain apps. When I try to download or update certain iPhone apps with iTunes I get the following error: stopped (err = -5000)
Originally this was only occurring with one app, and since downloading it via the app store on my iPhone worked OK I didn’t let it bother me. However, gradually more apps starting exhibiting the same behaviour. The error dialogue box seems to give a bit more information: There was a problem downloading “Camera+ .. the ultimate photo app”. You do not have enough access privileges for this operation.
So now I have four iPhone applications, all with the same problem. They are:
Can you pick the common denominator? All these applications use non standard characters in their file names. Characters that some file systems aren’t going to be happy about.
This all twigged for me after I read the official Apple iTunes troubleshooting guide, it told me to look for the path: “\Documents and Settings\username\My Documents\My Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\Downloads\” and delete the downloads folder. But this is my work computer, and we remap our home directories to a network drive, and to be specific, to a Novell Netware NSS volume. When I looked there other apps had entries, but these particular apps didn’t, and that’s when I had a hunch.
I tried creating files and folders using those application names. You just can’t do it! You can use those characters in Windows, but not on a Novell volume, even with long filename support etc.
So there you have it, if you are getting that error, and you’re using iTunes at work, have a think about where your downloads are being saved, where your My Documents folder actually resides, and if it’s a network drive it may just be that it’s not accepting these non standard characters.
The solution is to either download using you phone, or move the iTunes download folder to a local Windows drive.