Adobe Photoshop will not load - scratch disk are full

Question

When I try to open photoshop I get a scratch Disk Preference ! saying the currently selected scratch disks are full. please modify scratch disk preferences. I try holding control al when next starting photoshop only to get the same message. I have 1 active scratch disk on drive C;|\ it says 4.84GB free space information: startup

I tryed watch u tube videos howver they seem to point to "control alt" as a first step. I see no actions after "control alt"

i guess I could go into %temp% and delete file but that sounds a bit drastic. I did a windows disk cleanup but no help with that. also reboots do not eleiminate the problem

any suggestions?

D Fosse · Answer

The scratch disk is not a setting "inside" Photoshop. It is actual, physical disk space, and you don't have enough left for Photoshop to operate normally. There's no point in going into the scratch disk preferences if you don't have any free space to assign.

You need to clear out more disk space. That's the long and short of it. Depending on file sizes and how many files you have open, you should have at the very least 100GB free, but preferably more. Personally I'd consider 500 GB minimum.

Raster image editing moves huge amounts of data around, much more than can be held in system RAM. So this temporary working data are written to disk. That's the scratch disk. If there's no free disk space, Photoshop can't operate.

When you get this message, it means you're so low on disk space that you will soon have bigger problems. Worst case your whole system may freeze up.

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded