Means you’re run out of hard drive space for the scratch disk file (temporary file PS creates while working on images).
Need to free up some hard drive space.
First thing to look for, is: do a fresh boot and (if Win9x) delete everything in windows/temp folder. Things get stuck in there. Or just do search on entire HD for .tmp files.
You can use Disk Cleanup in System Tools to find some obvious unneeded files, but generally, if you need significantly more space you’ll need to delete unneeded files or uninstall applications.
Simply adding a hard drive and setting that for primary scratch disk is a pretty inexpensive and very effective fix also.
Mac
I have this same problem on a win 2k system running photoshop CS. I have 2 physical HDD’s – the 1st is c: boot and with a partition d:. d has 12Gb free and is set as primary scratch drive. I also have a second hard drive with 30Gb free, set as the secondary scratch drive. When I get the ‘scratch disks full’ message, I check the scratch folder sizes using explorer. Typically, when the system bombs out,the scratch disk sizes are no bigger than 4.199 Gb on either drive, leaving plenty of drive space unused. defragging makes no difference.
Any ideas?
I have over 1,5 GB of free space on my hard drive, so I do not see why this would be a problem…
Where are the scratch folders, and can I delete what’s in them?
It is a problem. 1.5 Gb can get used as scratch in no time depending on what you are doing, moreover if you are editing big images. You need to free up space on your hard drive for the scratch file. Check as well that there are no old PS temp files left over if the program ever crashed.
What is your overall hard drive configuration – how many physical drives, how are they partitioned, how much free space is on each drive/partition? And how is the Windows page file set up – fixed size or dynamic?
1.5 Gb isn’t nearly enough free space these days for any application, not just Photoshop, especially if the Windows page file is also competing for that space.
I’m kinda guessing here but could it be his drives are formatted as FAT and he is hitting the 4GB limit?
Would converting the drives to NTFS solve his problem?
Julius. Sorry to be talking ‘about’ you instead of ‘to’ you but I am asking the question on your behalf. We have lots of wizards on this forum and one of them will surely know the answer …
Jake
Check your "Preferences>Memory & Image Caches" settings and see how much space you have allowed PS to use. You might have 2 gigs space, but alloted only 25% for a scratch file. Bump that up to as much as you can and hopefully you should be fine.
Glenn
Glenn, that is RAM allocation. You can’t allocate the size of the scratch. This grows according to needs and can become very large for large images. I don’t know what Mike Hornsby’s problem is but I have no doubt that it is simply lack of disk space in the case of the original poster.
Ahh yes, I see what you are saying Mick. I was wondering if maybe he was running out of RAM and it mimiced a disk space error, but I suspect your theory is much more likely to be the problem. Hopefully he gets it figured out ok.
Well, back to my problem that I thought I had worked out, but turns out it’s still with me. Oh well :-).
Glenn
The FAT/NTFS is an interesting idea. When I migrated to win2k from 98, I kept the boot partition as FAT, whereas the other drives are NTFS. However, academic really as I have solved the problem by allocating ‘d’ as my scratch drive and installing a removable drive bay. When I need to work with very large files I put in a empty 60Gb hard drive.
Sorry, I meant the photoshop scratch disk is allocated to the empty drive ‘G’ – not ‘D’ which is a partition on the 1st HDD.( E & F being CD/DVD’s)
Mike,
Glad to hear you solved your problem.
Jake
