Photoshop won’t see 2nd internal drive for primary scratch

NR
Posted By
Neil_Reuben
Sep 3, 2006
Views
488
Replies
14
Status
Closed
I have a G5 dual core 2.3 with 2 internal SATA drives – 2nd one added by me – same brand, size model.

PSCS2 will not start up if the 2nd drive is selected as the primary scratch disk – "Photoshop can’t initialize because drive is not available"

have to use optn-cmd at startup to change the scratch. The drive is mounted, plenty of space and works with opening and saving images.

Would like to move the scratch off my startup drive – any ideas?

thx
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R
Ram
Sep 3, 2006
Any illegal characters in the name of that drive or any of its volumes? Stick to numbers, underscores and letters of the English alphabet. DO NOT use apostrophes, ampersands, asterisks, diacriticals, special characters. commas, slashes, etc.

Do you have read and write permissions?

What routine maintenance do you perform on your machine?

What troubleshooting steps have you performed so far?

What OS? Click here <http://www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/webx?50@@.2cd06cd9> for advice on how to ask your question correctly for quicker answers. Thanks!
AS
Ann_Shelbourne
Sep 3, 2006
Try launching Photoshop with Cmd Option Shift down (so that you can trash all prefs.); resetting the Prefs. especially Scrach disks; and then immediately quitting out of Photoshop.

Repair Permissions. Shut down completely. Reboot and relaunch Photoshop.

Another thing to consider is reformatting your second HD with Disk Utility.
B
Buko
Sep 3, 2006
disk should be formatted HSF+
NR
Neil_Reuben
Sep 3, 2006
Thanks for the replies – sorry for the lack of information below:

The exact version of the Adobe Application you are running – 9.0.1 Your Operating System details. 10.4.7 build 8J135
Amount of installed RAM. – 4.5 GB
Amount of free disk space. – Start up – 36 GB, 2nd drive 75GB Make/Model of Video Card. – nvidia GeForce 6600 256mb vram Printer Details if you have a print problem – none
The EXACT text of any Error Messages you saw – Photoshop can’t initialize because drive is not available

The drive is HFS+, journaled, has no illegals in the name, all cron scripts run regularly as system is up all the time, as well as DFS and repair permissions (which has no effect on the 2nd drive anyway).

Rebooted and trashed the prefs, no help. Reformatting the drive, sorry not yet…

But checking permissions – would not seem to be the problem. I have read & write, but either as owner or the system owning the drive no luck,

….until I uncheck "ignore ownership on this volume" – then it works.

But I don’t really want to ignore ownership as this volume has other files besides a scratch volume – is this a bug? PS is running as my userid, but there is an AdobeLM process running under root.

Creating a second partition is an answer, but still think it should work as is.
R
Ram
Sep 3, 2006
…until I uncheck "ignore ownership on this volume" – then it works.

Then there’s something quirky with the ownership of the drive. :/
R
Ram
Sep 3, 2006
Creating a second partition is an answer

Well, it would speed things up by making the first (faster) partition of the drive Photoshop’s primary scratch disk, say a 60GB or 70GB partition for that purpose.
R
Ram
Sep 3, 2006
is this a bug?

No; I’ve never seen it nor heard of someone else seeing it either, given the info you’ve provided.
NR
Neil_Reuben
Sep 3, 2006
Well, the permissions as it was when I first checked was Owner:system – R/W, Group:admin-R/W, Others:RO. My account is an admin account, and it correctly indicates that I can R/W.

I also changed ownership directly to my account, set to R/W. In both cases the results are the same – PS won’t start.

In either case, I can read & write files to the drive using PS and other applications. Other aps can use the drive for temp or scratch storage.

Also tried disabling async I/o plugin – no difference
NR
Neil_Reuben
Sep 3, 2006
I don’t have enough space to dedicate 60GB to a scratch partition – 10GB maybe. Is there a rule of thumb or guide for how much scratch is decided?
B
Buko
Sep 3, 2006
How big is your second drive?

drives are cheap now and I would not have a Scratch partition smaller than 60 GB.

I also wouldn’t have a second drive that is smaller than 500 GB.
NR
Neil_Reuben
Sep 3, 2006
250GB – too soon to throw it out. I’ve been thinking about an external sata array, but that’s a bit further down the road
AS
Ann_Shelbourne
Sep 3, 2006
The Scratch Partition or Drive seemingly does HAVE to be set to ""ignore ownership on this volume" because there have been other reports indicating that is so.

With 250 GB you can surely spare 60 GB for a separate Scratch partition and you would find it a huge improvement. You could then also set the permissions for the other partition the way that you want them.
R
Ram
Sep 4, 2006
don’t have enough space to dedicate 60GB to a scratch partition – 10GB maybe.

That may be a problem too. Figure on at least 35 times or more the size of your largest file for scratch disk size.

If you cannot spare more than 10GB, your drive may be too full already. Once a drive gets to be 85% full you are in deep, DEEP trouble.
NR
Neil_Reuben
Sep 4, 2006
Yes, that does seem to be a shortcoming of the current design that permissions can’t be set.

I’ll have to evaluate whether I want to dedicate that much space to scratch. Thanks

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