Scratch Disks

[Sean_Pendleton@adobeforums.com]

Help,

I am a novice in some respects and have come up against a problem I can't solve.
I am running Photoshop 6.0.1 on Mac and have been happily plodding along using it until today when I repeatedly get a pop up message box saying the following:
'Could not open "file name" because the scratch disks are full'.

What does this mean and how can it be fixed ?

thankyou in advance
Sean

[Ramón_G_Castañeda@adobeforums.com]

Sean,

It means your hard drive is full so Photoshop doesn't find enough drive space to build its scratch disks.

Photoshop uses part of a hard drive (several GB) as its internal Virtual Memory if you will. In Photoshop's preferences, you designate on which hard drive you want the scratch disk to reside.

If you don't designate a scratch disk, Photoshop uses your hard drive by default. When there's not enough space left on your hard drive, you get the error message you did.

The solution is, obviously, to make more hard drive space available to Photoshop, either by designating the scratch disk to reside on a separate hard drive, by getting a larger hard drive, or by deleting enough files from your existing hard drive to make space for the scratch disk.

Ideally, your scratch disk should be on a dedicated volume (partition) on a separate hard drive, so it doesn't slow you down. Some users dedicate up to 30GB or more to such a dedicated partition. Figure on at least 15 or 20 times the size of the largest Photoshop file you work with.

What OS are you on (exact version), how much RAM do you have installed and how much of that is allocated to Photoshop? How big is your hard drive and how much available space is left on it? Do you have additional hard drives?

[Ramón_G_Castañeda@adobeforums.com]

Regardless of the scratch disk issue, if your hard drive gets to be 85% full, you're in trouble already.