Work stoppage because of scratch disk error. The torture continues! Please help!

What version of Photoshop?

How big are your hard drives?

How much space is available on these drives?

Do a google search on:

"Could not complete your request because the scratch disks are full."

and see if any of these results apply to you.

Steve

A very fragmented hard drive could do this, you need contigous space for the scratch file. So, first thing, defragment.

BTW, "C" probably is your "Startup", so it’s the same.

If you have any money left, the way to go is to buy one more hard drive and use that as dedicated scratch disk – in other words, don’t put anything else on it. It doesn’t have to be big – 80 G will do fine. This will boost Photoshop performance in all kinds of ways.

That’s what is meant by the "error" message you got.

Before you defrag, do a search for .tmp files and delete them.

A scratch DISK is not the same as RAM memory… your error message has nothing at all to do with memory (like what you remember in your head) it is telling you that you don’t have enough space on your hard drive (like the already full suitcase you are trying to pack for vacation)

Upgrading from 512MB to 2GB of RAM is a good thing. It will definitely improve PS performance. But, it won’t solve your scratch disk problem.

As DGWaters mentioned, you need more hard drive space for your scratch files, and a separate, dedicated hard drive is a great way to do this. If you don’t want to add another drive, then you need to free some space on your C-drive (which is probably your Start-Up drive as well). To do a quick and easy C-drive cleanup:

1. Reboot and don’t launch any apps.
2. Launch Windows Explorer.
3. Navigate to C:\Windows\Temp
4. Select everything
5. Delete everything
6. If you get a message that something can’t be deleted, note what it is then start deleting everything again except that file or directory.
7. Keep on deleting everything in C:\Windows\Temp until there is nothing left to delete (that you are allowed to delete)
8. Empty your Recycle bin
9. Reboot

There’s no telling how much space this will free up, but I’ve seen it clear-up 18GB. Also, you should backup any photos, graphics, music or video files to CD and DVD that you can, then delete those from the C-drive and empty the Recycle Bin.

If you decide to install a dedicated scratch drive, all you need is a small one, like 36GB. If you have SATA-II hard drive support on your motherboard, that’s the drive you need. You’ll be amazed at how fast the SATA-II drives are. Highly recommended.

Thank you, everyone, for all this good feedback. I will try all recommendations and let you know how it goes.

I am running PS CS2 with an 80 GB HD.

I also read through additional TechNotes by Adobe, and maybe I need to adjust the percentage of memory used by PS. I forgot to check that, but I don’t believe it’s been changed in anyway. Or, perhaps a hard drive partition is needed? Has this helped anyone? I have never partioned a HD before.

The temp files were already deleted, the recyle bin already emptied, and large digital image files already removed. So, my 80 GB hard drive seems to be well optimized. However, I deleted my temp files in a different way, so I will check for more to delete following Sid’s step-by-step instructions (thank you for the clear instructions, Sid, they will be very helpful).

I have not heard of SATA-II drives before. I don’t know about them.

I do not fully understand the comment "your error message has nothing at all to do with memory." While I understand that a HD with too much on it may be the culprit, an IT professional explained to me that I needed more RAM in order to accomodate PS so that PS didn’t need to use HD space for Scratch disks, and that increasing the RAM is always recommended before using an external HD (or I would have bought the external HD instead of the RAM). Adobe technical documentation ( http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=33 2271) said the same:

Installed RAM

Photoshop requires the available RAM to equal several times the size of each image, depending on how you use the application. If Photoshop has insufficient memory, it uses hard-disk space (scratch disk) to process information. Because accessing information in memory is faster than accessing information on a hard disk, Photoshop is fastest when it can process all or most image information in memory (RAM), without using the scratch disk. Allocate enough memory to Photoshop to accommodate your largest image file.

needed more RAM in order to accomodate PS so that PS didn’t need to use HD space for Scratch disks

That’s exactly it. Your RAM increase was an excellent (and much needed) investment. That’s step one; the next step if you want to increase Photoshop performance is a dedicated scratch disk.

The basic problem is that both Photoshop and the operating system will do the same thing when you’re working on big chunks of data: the overflow is written to a hard drive. In Windows that’s called the page file; in Photoshop it’s called Scratch disk. When both are competing for the same read/write head on the same hard drive things will slow down; in some cases to a virtual deep freeze. Having a dedicated scratch disk avoids this, and keeps things humming even under heavy load.

Memory allocation is another thing. Keeping it at the default setting of 55% is a safe bet; you can perhaps increase that a little, but don’t go all the way. That will starve the other processes also running.

As for disk cleanup there’s a great little tool called ccleaner that you can download for free:

<http://www.ccleaner.com/>

Check your crop settings in the options bar. A common mistake is that somebody sets the crop settings wrong (like 300pixels/cm instead of per inch), which results in photoshop attempting to create a really large image that is beyond what the scratch disk can handle.

Careful about using the word "Torture" these days! 😀

Check out this link in knowledge bank for info on RAM and scratch disk.

It appears that it does not take much to get the need for multiple gigs of memory for an image, and unless you had 10 gigs of RAM of accessible you will need a scratch disk.

< http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?cmd=dis playKC&docType=kc&externalId=320005&sliceId=2&am p;docTypeID=DT_Tech_Notes&dialogID=737128230&stateId =1%200%20737132079>

Hi, everyone: Thank you for your help with my problem. I appreciate everyone’s time and feedback, as well as the openness to help and explain (and further explain) what I do not fully understand. I learned a lot more, as Photoshop always introduces new things to learn and figure out. (One has to be part programmer to make PS work!) I appreciated the clear instructions and simple analogies too (for example, the “head” vs. “suitcase” was great).

Good news: The Scratch disk error has subsided for now!

I believe (although I am not certain) that the problem was something very simple after all, and I am embarassed. Only time will tell if this was really the culprit, for, if the Scratch disk error reappears later, it may be something else all together that is lurking in the background.

For now, it seems to have been a problem that Peter K.’s advice helped me discover…

Peter’s advice was to check the crop settings in the option bar for the common mistake of specifying “pixels/cm” rather than “pixels/inch.” My setting was correct (pixels/inch). However, I inadvertently used my pixel width number as inches in the Width setting, causing a MUCH bigger file than intended. When I changed the number, the Scratch disk error disappeared, putting me back in business! Thanks, Peter, for pointing me the direction that eventually revealed the problem.

Could it be this simple?

I kept working most of the night to test drive, free of the Scratch disk error for now! I hope the good fortune continues.

The lesson for others may be to check simple settings carefully first, before diving into the deep end of Photoshop.

Meanwhile, the new RAM is speeding up Photoshop considerably, so I feel like it was a good investment and will probably help safeguard against further Scratch disk errors, which I have had in the past. Also, I’ve taken everyone’s advice to consider a dedicated, separate HD for Photoshop Scratch disk use. I’ll plan that as a future/next investment. However, technical notes say an external HD isn’t a good idea, but I don’t have capacity for an internal HD, so it will have to be an external one. I would appreciate any words of wisdom here. Also, I still have to research SATA-II drives too (which are new to me) and ascertain if I can utilize one on my system. It may simply be too old for this technology, if it is new?

If interested, I also tried several things:

(1) Checking the space available on my HD again – The pie chart indicated it was approximately half full (there was 46% free space, or 34.38 GB free space). I’ll look for more to remove, but it seems reasonable to have 46 percent available, I think.

(2) Checking the need to DEFRAG – The “Analyzer” said a DEFRAG was not needed, and, indeed, the color chart that plotted the files showed only a thin red line or two (red indicates fragmentation).

(3) Searching for more TEMP files to delete. I found 750 MB in TEMP files to delete, so, while not a lot, there were some still there. Previously I followed these directions to “safely delete” temporary Internet files: Ctrl Panel > Internet Options > General > Delete Files > Delete all offline content. But, when I navigated to C:\Windows\Temp, sure enough, I found more. Directly opening C:\Windows\Temp seems to be more effective. (I have done it that way in the past too, but lately I was trying to follow the "safe" way I had stumbled across recently.)

(4) Checking my Photoshop Memory Allocation, which was already set at 85% (which may be too high, so I may back it down later, but I did not change it for now). I remembered adjusting it some time ago, but I had forgotten by how much!

I also read the links that everyone recommended, as well as numerous other documents I found across the Web. Some introduced still more to learn/understand, of course.

Thank you once again. I’ll resurrect or repost if the Scratch disk error haunts me again later, but, for now, a happy ending.

Could it be this simple?

yes, reported here a couple times a month.

don’t worry. i’ve been using photoshop for years and years and i STILL do that occasionally! 🙂

Sounds like you have had good luck with good advice. Here are some further suggestions:

1. To clean out unneeded files: Click Start>Run and type cmd. In the command prompt box, type "cleanmgr -sageset:100" (without the quotes) (you can use any number you want after the colon, but 100 is easy to remember). A popup will let you select disc C:. Then you get to determine what to clean up. Be pretty aggressive. Make sure to select temporary files, internet crap, etc. You will eventually be returned to a command prompt. Then type "cleanmgr -sagerun:100" and go to bed or to work. You will end up with a much faster computer because of all the crap that has been removed.

2. Defragment, even if the Disk Management Defragment app says you don’t need to do so.

3. External drives: If your computer has an eSATA connector, and you get a SATA external drive, the drive will be the equivalent of an internal drive and will be great for scratch. Don’t try to use a USB or Firewire drive as a scratch drive. Also, there’s no real need for using a separate partition of your single internal drive for scratch, other than the fact that it will reserve sufficient space and tend to reduce fragmentation. Having the scratch files and Windows pagefile on the same physical drive is discouraged, but it’s not a commandment. In particular, if you have a drive that is fast and has a large cache, you may never see contention between the pagevile and scratch file. This is especially true if you have a lot of RAM, which means that you will be writing to scratch much less often.