I keep getting the scratch disks are full error (not sure why....I have three drives with plenty of space on them)

I re-assigned the scratch disk to go to my external drive that has over 300 of space. REstarted ps and still same message. Earlier this week I did get the virtural memory is low message...

I obviously am computer stupid, but can someone tell me how to clear out all the temporary stuff and anything else that might help. I have a wedding and 3 sessions to edit and can't do a darn thing.

I have had this problem before so I added more memory and hard drive space, but here I am again. I must be missing something simple.

Thanks!

Hi,
may I suggest a couple of things. First of all go through your disks and see what is taking up all that space. If you can, back up and store older pictures or move them to the external hard-disk. If you have a PC running windows try to defragement the drives. I searched the web and visible Photoshop CS say the following in the help file:
A) For best performance, scratch disks should be on a different drive than any large files you are editing.
Scratch disks should be on a different drive than the one used for virtual memory.
B) Scratch disks should be on a local drive. That is, they should not be accessed over a network.
C) Scratch disks should be conventional (non-removable) media.
D) Raid disks/disk arrays are good choices for dedicated scratch disk volumes.
E) Drives with scratch disks should be defragmented*regularly.

How many disks do you have? What system is running?

Niall

Thanks for taking the time to respond. As I said I am pretty much computer stupid, but in the past I have been able to do a system clean up and it took care of the problem. This time no such luck. I have enven done a system defrag...to no avail, the scratch disks are still full. I have one internal drive that is partitioned into two. On the c: I keep my program files etc...
On the d: (really the same drive) I keep various files such as digital scrapbooking stuff etc.
Then I have an 500gb ibook external drive where I keep all of my client files. This is the drive I have assigned my scratch disk to first, then the d , then the c.

I keep trying things...everytime I turn off the computer, when I turn it back on, I hope that magically it somehow will work.

Any advice? Yeah- I go tadvice...I need a new computer. Can I afford it right now? Nope...oh bummer. Anyone else got better advice than my own?

first, definitely try what dr. evil suggested, then have you tried defragging all of your external scratch disks? it is very important that there is contiguous space available on your scratch disk otherwise photoshop will not be happy and give you the error. so it doesn't matter how much space you have if the space is not contiguous.

what are some of your other symptoms? have you also tried restarting the computer?

one more thing i forgot .... make sure you have enough memory reserved just for photoshop. try bumping that up a little OR bumping it down. if you have too much memory allocated this can be bad too. also try different file sizes and see if you still get the error ... process of elimination.

also, did photoshop crash on you at anytime? if so you might have some temporary files still on your drive taking up space. look for files that have '.tmp' in your directories and delete them - with photoshop closed.

So yes I am sort of blonde, but no I am not really a blonde dummie.....just a little techno challenged. So I realze that I am trying to resize my image to 1200 x600 ppi- for my new site and I changed it in the crop toolbar, but it kept defalting and adding the inches after the numbers. I don't remember having this proplem before, but I guess I am doing something wrong...at least it is not really my scratch disks...it was just that I couldn't crop my image to a 1200 inches by 600 inces that would be a 100 feet by 50 feet.! Crazy!

So why is it dfaulting to inches?

whoa 1200" x 600"!! yeah that would make your scratch disk full, unless your resolution was set to about 1

i think the issue is with your preferences. go under your preferences menu > units & rulers, and under 'Units' - if your rulers are set to 'inches' then the crop tool will default back to that. so change that to 'pixels'

hope this helps!!

That's my lil sis for you. Trust me I have some pictures of how true of a blonde she really is. I tried to help her but I guees I failed to get that little bit of info about the inches bit. I hope you got it worked out, sis. I was wondering why I haden't received any calls from you lately about this, I figured since I didn't know the answer you didn't want to talk to me anymore.

Um. There's a lot of things going on here, none of them fully baked. There's no such thing as 1200x600 ppi. 1200x600 just reflects the number of _fill in the blank_ you have. Pixels, inches, whatever.

If you're talking about a website, then you are resizing your images to 1200x600 pixels. Typically, the best way to do this is set your DPI to 72 (web standard) and then set the number of pixels to 1200x600. Make sure you set the measurement to pixels in photoshop when you're editing the 1200x600 number.

As to your scratch disks, I read through but didn't see anywhere you mention how much room you have on your main system drive. You have talked about your externals, but that's not relevant when it comes to your system getting bunched up because of virtual memory. How much free space do you have on c:, since that is where Windows defaults to build VM. Are you SURE the errors have to do with Photoshop's scratch disks, which are entirely separate from your system's?

Since you're talking c: d: I'm going to make the wild assumption you're on a PC and not a Mac (pity). Why did you partition your drive in the first place? It's rarely a good idea, and almost always a bad idea if you don't know what you're doing. Had you left it as one drive, there would be more room for scratch disks to play. Scratch disks are just what the computer uses when you run out of RAM. If you don't have a lot of RAM, the scratch disk (or virtual memory), can become quite large.

We need to know what kind of space you have on C: and likely, D:.

K