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sunstonecreations
Participant
May 19, 2012
Question

Unable to start Photoshop CS6 - could not open a scratch file because the file is locked (Windows)

  • May 19, 2012
  • 11 replies
  • 201477 views

When I first installed Adobe Photoshop CS6 I was unable to run Photoshop or Bridge CS6.  Photoshop would give me an error about "could not open a scratch file because the file is locked.  If I ran either of these programs as an administrator they would run without issue, this led me to believe that there was a permission issue somewhere.  After some digging I found out the both Bridge and Photoshop try to create a temp file (similiar to Photoshop Temp2777223910092) on the c:\ drive of the computer.  In my case the user that I was logged in with did not have access to write to the root of the C:\ drive.  Note that you run the program as the administrator and change the scratch disk location as that changes the preference for the administrator user and not the user that you are currently logged in as.

To get around this issue I first had to give the user that I was logged on with write permissions to the root of the C:\ drive.  Next try and run Photoshop, you will get an error another error about the scratch disk and about and invalid or missing setting file.  To correct this you need to have run Photoshop as an administrator, next you can go to Users\Admin\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS6\Adobe Photoshop CS6 Settings and copy Adobe Photoshop CS6 Prefs and/or Adobe Photoshop X64 CS6 Prefs to Users\<your logged in username>\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS6\Adobe Photoshop CS6 Settings.

Photoshop and bridge should now start up with no issues.

I hope that this can help others out there as this caused me a great deal of frustration when upgrading to CS6.

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    Noel Carboni
    Noel Carboni
    Legend
    May 19, 2012

    Normally you should not have to run Photoshop As Administrator.  The installer, if coded correctly, should set up whatever permissions are needed when it is run with elevated privileges.

    Note that I did not say the installer is coded correctly.  Adobe really does need to deal with this - some people are clearly having permissions problems on Windows with UAC enabled.

    This business of writing things into the root folder of a hard drive...  Bad practice by Adobe.  What's needed is for the scratch setup dialog to allow the specification of FOLDERS, not just drives.

    -Noel

    T
    tomaugerdotcom
    Known Participant
    January 4, 2013

    I'm going to add my 2c to this post because I had this issue and was able to resolve it satisfactorily. There is a lot of bad behaviour by some arrogant users in this thread, but I'm replying up here anyway despite the grief of reading through a lot of - frankly - useless garbage and verbal harangueing.

    Your mileage may vary but here is my scenario: a relatively small SSD as my boot disk, and a large HDD as my data drive. I had already moved /Users to the HDD creating a hard link, and I need my /TEMP directory to be on the HDD because that directory gets a crapton of stuff thrown into it including temporary internet files etc, and I don't want it taking up valuable resources on my boot drive.

    Originally I had just created the TEMP directory on my D:\ drive and then pointed the environment variables there. But it looks like Photoshop, InDesign, Bridge, Encore and god knows what else for some reason NEED TEMP to be on the C:\ drive.

    The solution: create another hard link (junction) for C:\TEMP to D:\TEMP like this:

    Open up a command prompt, navigate to your C:\ drive, check that there is NO TEMP folder yet and then enter:

    mklink /J C:\TEMP D:\TEMP

    (use drive letters that are appropriate to your setup).

    Then go back and re-edit your environment variables to point TEMP and TMP to C:\TEMP again. Note that you have to do this in 4 places - look through the entire list of system and environment variables and change them all.

    Now you have the best of both worlds: A) your TEMP files are off your boot drive and are on your data drive B) your Windows environment variables are set up correctly C) Adobe apps THINK they're writing to C drive even though they're not.

    I don't know for the life of me why Adobe apps care (they should not, and should just respect your environment variables - that's why Microsoft created them!), but they seem to care. This should solve the issue.

    DISCLAIMER: I'm writing this only moments after having implemented this solution and the only tests I have performed are booting Photoshop, Bridge and InDesign. But where they were all crashing before, they are now booting up correctly.

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