Participant

Question

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

Forum|Forum|13 years ago
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.

This topic has been closed for replies.

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Lame Tigrrrr

Participating Frequently

This thread is almost three years old and my problem with this scratch disk thing--after trying all those possible solutions--is still giving me pain in the a$$! Setting my scratch disks to at least a separate partition (if using a single drive pc, even my temp/tmp, shell folders/libraries for that matter) has been a practice since CS2 since I don't like Phtotoshop (or any other app) messing with my system drive.

In particular, this problem--in fairness to Photoshop and to Adobe in general--only occurs when I try to paste an object from Illustrator to Photoshop as Smart Object or Pixel. And this problem only occurs in PS 6. I have no problem like this in PS2 by the way.

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Dryne

Inspiring

Folks, it is near the end of 2016 and will be 2017 soon. I just installed Photoshop CS6 to find that I am getting this scratch disk error. I only have a C: drive and no other drives under Windows 10 Professional. I launched Photoshop by pressing CTRL+SHIFT+ALT then clicking YES when asked. Under preferences, I cannot uncheck the scratch disk under the C: drive at all. Photoshop will not let me.

According to the post from Jeff-Adobe over three years ago, this issue was supposed to have been fixed? I have installed all available updates for Photoshop CS6 after I started it as per above. However, I constantly get this scratch disk issue with each and every start of this program.

Sahil.Chawla

Adobe Employee

Hi Dryne,

May I know how many local drives do you see on your computer? I think the reason you are not able to uncheck C: drive is because you only have C: drive and no other drives. If you only have one local drive, then I recommend you to delete all the temp files and empty the recycle bin and try launching Photoshop after doing that.

To delete temp files Open the windows explorer then type %TEMP% and hit enter, then delete all the files stored in this location.

Regards,

Sahil

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theking2

Inspiring

Giving users write permission to C:/ is one of the worst things you could do. You really can't trust a user or the virii this user could contract.

Better:

start PS as administrator

set Temp data to something else as C:/ for instance D:/ and remove the checkmark for C:/

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theking2

Inspiring

I have the same problem.

Newly installed Windows 8

Newly installed CS6

Photoshop started for the first time says "Could not open a Scrat" and after that "Could not initialize Photoshop..."

Photoshop does create an empty "Adobe Photoshop X64 CS6 Prefs.psp" in "C:\Users\user\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS6\Adobe Photoshop CS6 Settings"

Photoshop can be started as Administrator but I don't want to start Photoshop as administrator.

From where can I copy a basic "Adobe Photoshop X64 CS6 Prefs.psp"?

cleggy79

Participant

Hello, were seeing an error with Photoshop CS6 and it looks to relate to our mandatory profiles. Our users don't have any admin rights and the application launches and then errors. It looks to be struggling to create the pslog.txt file in the users profile.

If I login with admin rights it is creating this file in the route of C: The question is why can't PS write into the users profile temp folder on a mandatory profile? InDesign works ok, that writes into the temp directory fine.

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Anonymous

thanks for the help,

this is bad form on Adobe's part

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Prime61071

Participant

I ran into this problem this morning on a brand new machine that I'd built specifically for the purpose of photo editing with Photoshop.

My machine, for those interested, has the following disk setup:

1 x 256 gigabyte Samsung Pro 840 SSD as the boot drive (C:)

2 x 2 terabyte Seagate HDD in a RAID 1 array (E:)

1 x 128 gigabyte Samsung Pro 840 SSD as a dedicated scratch disk (F:)

To save space on my SSD boot drive, I'd used Microsoft's Sysprep utility to relocate the '\Users' directory in its entirety to the E: drive during the installation of Windows. This, I believe, is what caused the error when launching Photoshop.

The computer is running Windows 8 64-bit, and aside from the Adobe Creative Cloud application installer, Photoshop CC was the first application installed other than Windows updates and device drivers.

In my case, the solution was to hold Ctrl+Alt+Shift when starting Photoshop under a normal user account, then immediately go to the Edit menu -> Preferences -> Performance and uncheck the C: drive as a scratch disk location and check my F: drive. Photoshop now opens normally.

I hope this helps!

Message was edited by: Prime61071 Corrected the menu entry.

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Thilo1212

Participating Frequently

Hi,

I am having a similar issue yet your proposed fix does not fix it.

C(Boot) is SSD

D-Drive is HDD

F-Drive is SSD (with most proograms including Adobe CC).

I changed the scratch disk from C to D and the above problem ("Could not open a scratch file because the file is locked, you do not have necessary permissions, or another program is using the file. Use the 'properties' command in Windows Explorer to unlock the files")

I have WIn 8 and before I changed the scratch file location, Photoshop worked just fine!

Please help!

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Andrew_Russell

Participating Frequently

This may or may not help, but have you tried right-clicking Photoshop to launch it with the "Run As Administor" option when you try the CTRL+ALT+SHIFT Key combo?

(I don't know if that will help. I'm just putting on my random "Win8 Security Wierd'isms Cap" and thinking about the phrase "necessary permissions" from the dialog.)

I had the same problem when I switched to an SSD with Win7. The Ctrl+Alt+Shift should work, but I think I had to "Run as Administrator" to get the related registery changes to take hold.

Good Luck!

Andrew

3

300188

Inspiring

Thank you so much for sharing your experience. This greately helped me. Here is what happened to me:

As Windows was becoming too big I moved the "Windoss/ Temp" File to an other drive in my computer. After that Photoshop and Bridge would not work anymore. I got the message "could not open a scratch file because the file is locked". Just like you if I ran Photoshop as an administrator I could then open it but it would not work anymore within CS6. The dynamic link being broken.

Reading your post helped me to understand the issue and I put back the Temp Folder in Windows. After that everything is working again.

Thanks again

Cristiana

PECourtejoie

Community Expert

I'm wondering if it would be possible to first move the scratch disk location, then move the temp directory.

Cristiana, did you try what tomauger suggested?

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angelluzita

Participant

hello!! please someone help me i get the message o the scratch disk missing file. , ive tried a lot of the things you post it:

* press ctrl alt shift, and erase the setting, but still the same error

* run the program right click as administrator, same error

* press ctrl alt and choose my removable hard disc (which took a longgg time to make it work... but it opened!!! =D, but a msg appear about javascript not been found, and i couldnt save anything that i did because another msg appeard saying that the file could not be found)

* disable the UAC

i just have one user on my laptop, so i cant copy the files from one user to the other i guess thats not my case, (or somethin like that im not very familiar with programing or things like that, so please explain evertithing step by step) and i have just one hard disc, with 50 gb free. windows 7, 32 bits, photoshop cs6.

so nothing works, please please help me =( =(

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DarkWolf719

Participant

all you have to do is use pixels instead of inches

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tattooedmonkey

Participant

I had the same problem on the mac. Find where the PS preference files are stored and delete them. Also check every disk you have as a scratch disk and by no means uncheck the drive the application is running off of. This is where I ran into problems.

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efridine

Participant

I had the same problem as everyone else and read the thread, started as administrator and changed the scratch disk to my media disk instead of the default c:\ drive.

I can't believe software this expensive won't launch after installation because of an issue like this. Photoshop is screaming for a competitor

S

Swin70

Participating Frequently

So I have come across this thread to try and find a resolution for this issue and i have to say parts of this upset me.

Half the thread is people accussing others of either not listening to the advice or yelling.

the whole segment of the person who hit no when photoshop asked them to delete their settings was very annoying since i did hit yes and thats when this whole thing started.

instead of making people who have this issue read a whole page of people arguing about stupid things that don't adress the issue why not put up something usefull.

my photoshop worked PERFECT for 2 years until i clicked yes to deleting my settings this morning. Now i get the scratch error. the reason i did that was because my fonts were all screwed up and someone suggested that would fix the error.

I have 200 gb free, all tmp files removed. i am unable to edit the scratch file settings under performance even in admin mode.

so does anyone have a solution to this issue?

I take it that you are running WIndows 7 and have tried all the CTRL+SHIFT+ALT stuff?

If so, does PS start OK as the Administrator? To check, run PS as Admin, Right click PS icon, then click "Run as Administrator"

If it works, try copying the settings file from the Administrator profile to your profile

Copy

"C:\Users\Adminstrator\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS6\Adobe Photoshop CS6 Settings\Adobe Photoshop X64 CS6 Prefs.psp"

to

"C:\Users\YOURUSERPROFILE\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS6\Adobe Photoshop CS6 Settings\"

(Note- The above asumes you are using the 64bit version and that you profiles are on the C partition.)

I would love to knwo if this helps anyone, or if it just help helped me.

dean.p

Inspiring

Hi, I have the "scratch file" problem also. It seems to only happen if I open pre-CS6 photoshop files that contain smart objects (so far).

Example, open CS5 PSD file fine. Create a new doc (file>new). Drag smart object from first document to second, I get "Could not open a scratch file because the file is locked....".

If I rasterize the smart object before moving, then I don't get the error.

Another example is that if I open the CS5 PSD file and try and edit the smart object, it will go through to illustrator fine, I can edit the vector object, but when done and I get sent back to PS, I get the 'scratch file' error and the smart object is not updated. Resaving the PSD from PS CS6 does not fix issue.

PS CS6 would crash on startup before I deleted preferences, ran as admin and changed cache drive.

I have OS on C: (SSD)

Userfolder on P: (WD 1TB)

I have been previously using CS5 Master collection with no issues. Just did a straight uninstall and installed CS6 via cloud, applied all updates.

As it stands, Bridge and Indesign will only run as Admin without crashing (which disables any ability to work and save to network server) and I get this error with PS.

System specs:

Noel Carboni

Legend

dean.p wrote:
I have OS on C: (SSD)
Userfolder on P: (WD 1TB)

I have no insight into what Adobe may have coded that would lead to problems in this arrangement, but you're not the first who has reported here a problem where relocating things off a small SSD has led to problems. I know of at least two others who have said they can only run Photoshop successfully As Administrator after having done similar things that should just work.

Not that this can be an easy workaround for you but an approach that works (I know because I use it myself) is to create a huge C: volume from multiple SSDs in RAID 0. This also has the advantage of pushing the increased performance up even higher and wear-loading the individual disks less (though that's not really a practical problem any longer with modern SSDs). Pointing parts of your system to a spinning hard drive does slow things down.

-Noel

J

jerdenberg

Participating Frequently

This problem surfaced on my pc immediately upon starting Photoshop CS6 after installing Design Standard. In line with comments above, I then started it as administrator, and found the installation program had marked my boot drive (a relatively early [=small] SSD), as the only scratch drive, even though there also is a large drive with loads of free space. I changed the scratch disk to the latter drive, and the problem disappeared.

I have two gripes with this:

First, wouldn't it be simple for the installation program to check whether the intended scratch disk is fit for the purpose, and request the user's input about the choice of scratch disk, limiting the choices to those drives that meet Photoshop's requirements?

Second, it would seem logical for Photoshop -- in case there is a problem with the scratch disk -- to proceed along the lines described above, instead of throwing an error message that does not even identify the problematic disk.

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petersjoo

Participating Frequently

As Adobe is one of the big "industry standard" software makers I really don't know where to start. Constant crashing, inconsistent workflow and stupid, stupid errors like this makes my wonder why it is "industry standard". I'm not able to change permissions on drive C, becuase of normal user account rules set in Windows Group Policies, and thereby not able to run Photoshop at all as a user.

Come on Adobe! Mercury cache this and tilable patterns that, make your software run first!

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