Scratch Disk Full error in Photoshop

[Roslyn89]

Hi

I know there are multiple posts about Scratch disks being full, but I need an easy way to clear scratch disks for students in high school. I have a number of them that are having this issue and can't open Photoshop. We have tried a couple of tutorials that I have found but nothing seems to be working.

My students have a mix of PCs and Macs

[Akash Sharma]

Hi there,

Sorry to hear about this. Which version of Photoshop are you using? 

Would you mind checking the troubleshooting steps mentioned in this article https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/scratch-disks-preferences.html#Troubleshootscratchdiskfuller... and let us know if that helps?

Thanks,

Akash

[Roslyn89]

Hi Akash,

I have looked at that tutorial, and we can get around it by using an external hard drive but how do I clear the students scratch disk from their computer?

[Akash Sharma]

Thanks for the update. 

You can tweak scratch disk settings in the Preferences > Scratch Disks section.

• Choose Edit > Preferences > Scratch Disks (Windows) or Photoshop > Preferences > Scratch Disks (Mac).
• In the Preferences dialog, select or deselect the active check box to enable or disable a scratch disk. To change the scratch disk order, click the arrow buttons.
• Click OK. To apply the changes, restart Photoshop.

Let us know how it goes.

~Akash

[D Fosse]

If the disk is full, the disk is full. You can't clear that short of physically moving files off the disk to clear out free space.

It's fairly typical that laptop users with limited technical knowledge allow their system disks to fill up to capacity. The problem is that Photoshop can't function in that environment. It needs physical disk space for temporary working memory.

Photoshop's working memory is mainly on disk, not in RAM. There is so much data being moved around that RAM is insufficient no matter how much there is installed. But this scratch file needs to be put somewhere. By default it goes to the system drive.

On a desktop system you can usually fit another drive, problem solved. On a laptop you can't do that - so it's either a (slow) external, or you need to have enough free space on the system drive.

It does happen occasionally that the scratch disk full message comes up in error, and in that case resetting preferences may help. But usually the message is real, and means exactly what it says.

[alicejolly0891]

In order to fix could not initialize Photoshop because the scratch disk are full error you need to change a location of the Scratch Disks. It is one of the option that you can easily apply to get rid of this Photoshop error.

Here is how you can change a Scratch Disk location:

• Launch & click on the Photoshop menu >> Preferences  >> click on a Scratch Disk.
• After this, tick on a checkbox in order to choose/remove a drive as the scratch disk >> click OK.
• Now, reboot your Photoshop application as well as system to apply all changes.

Hope the above given steps will be useful for you.