Scratch Disk Full??

Hi All,
When I start Photoshop 7 I get a window pops up saying "Scratch Disk
Preferences = The Currently Selected Scratch Disk are Almost Full"
What is a Scratch Disk? How do I empty it or change??
Any help is appreciated.
George-NY

George-NY asks ...

What is a Scratch Disk?

The default setting for Photoshop is to take 50% of your RAM for
temporary storage as it works its magic. You can change this % with
Edit - Preferences - Memory and Image Cache ... if you have only 512 MB
or less I'd stick with 50% to leave RAM for the system and other
programs, but if you have 1 - 2 GB you can go higher (mine is set to
86% for example).

Once Photoshop needs more RAM than this it starts storing data on the
hard drive and calls this space the "scratch disk". You can watch this
by doing Window - Status Bar (I'm using CS but I think this is the same
or very similar for V7) and in the bottom left click on the chevron and
select 'scratch sizes' ... the first # is how much scratch space you
currently need, the second how much RAM you have allocated ... once the
first # is larger than the second you are now working on your scratch
disk (and things start to slow down because of the slower access).

How do I empty it or change??

You can't empty it but you can change which disk you want to use as
scratch (if you have more than one) with Edit - Preferences - Plugins &
Scratch Disks. The system runs faster if you have the scratch disk on
something other than C.

So check your hard drive that's assigned as scratch and see how much
free space you have. Possibly you have very little free space so
Photoshop gets worried. It's also a good idea to defrag that disk
since Photoshop will run faster with large blocks of contiguous disk
space.

Any help is appreciated

Hope this helps ... there should be something in the Photoshop Help
files on this too, now that you understand the background a bit better.

Bill

Thanks Bill for all the info...I have 1GB RAM. I will make a change to 86%
and let you know what happened. Thanks again for the help.
George-NY
"Bill Hilton" wrote in message
oups.com...
George-NY asks ...

What is a Scratch Disk?

The default setting for Photoshop is to take 50% of your RAM for
temporary storage as it works its magic. You can change this % with
Edit - Preferences - Memory and Image Cache ... if you have only 512 MB
or less I'd stick with 50% to leave RAM for the system and other
programs, but if you have 1 - 2 GB you can go higher (mine is set to
86% for example).

Once Photoshop needs more RAM than this it starts storing data on the
hard drive and calls this space the "scratch disk". You can watch this
by doing Window - Status Bar (I'm using CS but I think this is the same
or very similar for V7) and in the bottom left click on the chevron and
select 'scratch sizes' ... the first # is how much scratch space you
currently need, the second how much RAM you have allocated ... once the
first # is larger than the second you are now working on your scratch
disk (and things start to slow down because of the slower access).

How do I empty it or change??

You can't empty it but you can change which disk you want to use as
scratch (if you have more than one) with Edit - Preferences - Plugins &
Scratch Disks. The system runs faster if you have the scratch disk on
something other than C.

So check your hard drive that's assigned as scratch and see how much
free space you have. Possibly you have very little free space so
Photoshop gets worried. It's also a good idea to defrag that disk
since Photoshop will run faster with large blocks of contiguous disk
space.

Any help is appreciated

Hope this helps ... there should be something in the Photoshop Help
files on this too, now that you understand the background a bit better.

Bill

That means your HardDisk is almost full and lacks of space for virtual
memory. Do some cleaning to clear unwanted data to retrieve some HD space or
get another new one.

"George-NY" wrote in message
...
Hi All,
When I start Photoshop 7 I get a window pops up saying "Scratch Disk
Preferences = The Currently Selected Scratch Disk are Almost Full"
What is a Scratch Disk? How do I empty it or change??
Any help is appreciated.
George-NY

George-NY writes ...

Thanks Bill for all the info

No problem ...

I have 1GB RAM. I will make a change to 86% and let you
know what happened

Just to be clear, this won't solve the "The Currently Selected Scratch
Disk are Almost Full" message. It will tell Photoshop to hog more of
your system RAM so it will take longer for you to actually need the
scratch disk (and this should speed up Photoshop) but you'll likely
still get the same warning message until you have more free hard drive
space.

Bill

kctan wrote:

That means your HardDisk is almost full and lacks of space for virtual
memory. Do some cleaning to clear unwanted data to retrieve some HD space or
get another new one.

Sadly I have had this report when my hard disc was and still is
nowhere near half full

--
Paul (Some of them, they surprise)
-------------------------------------------------------
Stop and Look
http://www.geocities.com/dreamst8me/

Thank you to all that replied. I have a 160GB hard drive with more then
half free. I defrag once a week. I don't think that is the problem.
George-NY
"Paul Heslop" wrote in message
...
kctan wrote:

That means your HardDisk is almost full and lacks of space for virtual
memory. Do some cleaning to clear unwanted data to retrieve some HD
space or
get another new one.

Sadly I have had this report when my hard disc was and still is
nowhere near half full

--
Paul (Some of them, they surprise)
-------------------------------------------------------
Stop and Look
http://www.geocities.com/dreamst8me/

Could it be your scratch disk partition is too small? If I'm not forgotten,
Photoshop recommended an empty partition with minimum 10X your per working
file size for scratch disk. I use an empty 5GB partition and sometime still
got this problem when a file getting too big.

"Paul Heslop" wrote in message
...
kctan wrote:

That means your HardDisk is almost full and lacks of space for virtual
memory. Do some cleaning to clear unwanted data to retrieve some HD space
or
get another new one.

Sadly I have had this report when my hard disc was and still is
nowhere near half full

--
Paul (Some of them, they surprise)
-------------------------------------------------------
Stop and Look
http://www.geocities.com/dreamst8me/

kctan wrote:

Could it be your scratch disk partition is too small? If I'm not forgotten,
Photoshop recommended an empty partition with minimum 10X your per working
file size for scratch disk. I use an empty 5GB partition and sometime still
got this problem when a file getting too big.

I think that was how I got it to work when it first started doing it.
It still kicks up every now and again though and odd bits of photoshop
have always crashed my computers.

--
Paul (Some of them, they surprise)
-------------------------------------------------------
Stop and Look
http://www.geocities.com/dreamst8me/

"kctan" a écrit dans le message de
...
Could it be your scratch disk partition is too small? If I'm not
forgotten,
Photoshop recommended an empty partition with minimum 10X your per working
file size for scratch disk. I use an empty 5GB partition and sometime
still
got this problem when a file getting too big.

"Paul Heslop" wrote in message
...
kctan wrote:

That means your HardDisk is almost full and lacks of space for virtual
memory. Do some cleaning to clear unwanted data to retrieve some HD
space
or
get another new one.

Sadly I have had this report when my hard disc was and still is
nowhere near half full


I was batch processing many pics and I had 15Gb free. After about 250
pictures, the disk was full. Shutting down Photoshop restored the free
space. Looks to me like Photoshop grabs swap space as it goes along and
does not release it untill the session is finished. The cure I got a bigger
disk ;-)

Jean