Scratch Disk Full??? HELP!

[kristinwilson]

I'm praying for a geek to come to my rescue.

I don't know what the heck a scratch disk is or where it is or what it does or how to clear it or whatever I need to do so I can open my Adobe Photoshop and make changes to my pictures! HELP! My computer says it's full and I don't know what to do!!!

[pip22]

This is how Photoshop describes what it calls a 'scratch disk':
"When your system does not have enough RAM to perform an operation, Photoshop and ImageReady use a proprietary virtual memory technology, also called scratch disks. A scratch disk is any drive or a partition of a drive with free memory. By default, Photoshop and ImageReady use the hard drive that the operating system is installed on as its primary scratch disk.

You can change the primary scratch disk and, in Photoshop, designate a second, third, or fourth scratch disk to be used when the primary disk is full. Your primary scratch disk should be your fastest hard disk, and should have plenty of defragmented space available."

So if you only have one hard disk and it's full, you'll either have to give it a good and thorough clearout or buy a second hard disk. Even then you'll still need to give your existing disk a good clearout because very soon Windows itself will start complaining about it and performance will suffer.

[JimP]

Originally Posted by kristinwilson

I'm praying for a geek to come to my rescue.

I don't know what the heck a scratch disk is or where it is or what it does or how to clear it or whatever I need to do so I can open my Adobe Photoshop and make changes to my pictures! HELP! My computer says it's full and I don't know what to do!!!

Hi, This wont help you much, but you already have a pretty good reply. Scratch is a hold- over from the early days of computers when hard drives did not exist and the best mass storage was mag tape. The scratch tape was mounted to give the system some storage to use to run a job. Scratch Disk is for the same purpose today.
Jim

[slslea]

Originally Posted by JimP

Hi, This wont help you much, but you already have a pretty good reply. Scratch is a hold- over from the early days of computers when hard drives did not exist and the best mass storage was mag tape. The scratch tape was mounted to give the system some storage to use to run a job. Scratch Disk is for the same purpose today.
Jim

I had the same problem with my photoshop what I did to clear this up is press Alt+Ctrl+Shift+Delete when photoshop starts up make sure to hold them down until a window pops up and hit yes this will erase all of your settings but it should work.

[slslea]

Sorry I mean reset your settings.