Premiere Pro not allowing storage on external hard drive

[Chisnamic]

Premiere Pro not allowing storage on external hard drive , error says :

'

Invalid location :    THE LOCATION YOU HAVE CHOSEN IS A REMOVABLE DRIVE . PLEASE CHOOSE ANOTHER LOCATION

[shooternz]

What kind of moveable drive?

[Chisnamic]

A regular external hard drive

[R Neil Haugen]

How about something like "a Samsung T1 on a USB3 connection" ... or "a Passport SSD on USB2" ... the nature of the drive media (spinner/SSD) and the type of connection.

Neil

[Ann Bens]

Make sure you have all the correct permissions set for that drive.

[Warren Heaton]

How is the drive formatted?

Fat32?

ExFAT?

NTFS

HFS+?

When outside of Premiere are yiu able to read and write to the drive as expected?

[Chisnamic]

Thanks to everyone for trying to help with this problem , but an array of external hard drives have been tried here including Seagate and Western Digital , also Lexar and Transcend flash drives.The point here is that all of the drives mentioned have also been used with FCP , Avid  and  Edius  NLE's and have all functioned very properly. Why a problem with Adobe Premiere Pro CC ?

[cvid01]

A few more facts would be nice for us to have. Are you trying to download PPCC to an external drive or are you trying to save a project to an external drive? If the former, Adobe won't allow it likely because you are just "renting" the product and not buying it. All the other products you mention are purchased as your own under license. Adobe needs to check your computer every so often to ensure that your computer is the only one (or two) using the product. Allowing it to be used on an external hard drive makes it easier to be moved and used by various computers which is contrary to Adobe's license. I am just guessing here since you really haven't to us what you are trying to store.

[R Neil Haugen]

I've used ... and currently use ... a wide array of externals with PrPro without issues, both Win7 and now Win10, on both laptop and desktop.

eSATA connection to say BlacXor Thermaltake pop-in drive boxes, USB to the same, PNY 128GB flashdrive via USB3, now a WavLink external box via USB3.

To the laptop (besides most of the above) I've used external USB2 connected external drives either "spinning" or SSD from Seagate, WD, and others.

I've never done anything "special" to get the externals to work with PrPro. If they're properly formatted and "permissioned" through the OS, PrPro doesn't seem to give a rat's tail whether they're internal or external.

The sustained read/write performance of any specific drive/connection combo ... as a performance "limiter" within PrPro ... that can be crucial.

I've found that an external eSATA can be quite useful in PrPro, as long as the drive (if a spinner) was fast & half-empty or an SSD, and tech guru for all things Adobe DVA Bill Gehrke has reported great success using the Samsung T3 externals via USB3, getting sustained read/write numbers the equal or better of any internal spinner he's ever used.

So ... external drives are used by many other people with PrPro, so it's not rational to say "PrPro will not work with external drives". Clearly, on your setup, it isn't.

So ... figuring out why it isn't on your machine is the key part here.

Shall "we" talk about your drives, the connections, formatting, permissions, that sort of thing?

Neil

[Chisnamic]

Thanks to everyone of  you for your professional assistance your help is greatly appreciated and I'll definitely  explore everyone of the options that you have suggested , but just to add one more thing that I probably did not explain correctly  :

The project and everything else has already been created , saved etc , etc .  I am just trying  to store the audio / video files on an external hard drive instead of saving them on the edit computer's main drive , and that's where I am getting the error message.

Thanks .

[R Neil Haugen]

Huh ... that sounds like PrPro doesn't think the permissions on that drive are correct, or that it doesn't have the space. Those would be my guesses ...

Neil

[Chisnamic]

Thanks very much again to everyone for your assistance , the problem has been solved.

[Ann Bens]

Might want to share the solution for others with the same problem.

And then we can check the question with the correct answer.

[Chisnamic]

Thanks , I reformatted all the drives and things are back together, thanks to all.

[excited_Genie16B8]

Step 3H should solve this.

Premiere Pro Troubleshooting Guide

[Guest]

Well this limitation is really aggravating. There is no reason for this, especially when using a fast USB 3.0 flash drive.

However I have discovered a solution. By manually editing the registry for the media cache location, you can FORCE Premiere to use a USB flash drive anyway. Once this setting is in place, it does not complain about it.

1 Plug in your external USB storage.

2. Check to see what drive letter your external USB device uses.

3 Create a new blank text file (New -> Text file)

4 Open it and paste into it the following:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Adobe\Common 14.0\Media Cache]

"DatabasePath"="F:\\Premiere\\"

"FolderPath"="F:\\Premiere\\"

5. If your USB drive is not F, edit the above to be your removable drive letter.

6. Save this text file and close it

7. Go to Explorer options, show extensions

8. Rename this text file to ForceAdobePremierToUseRemovableMedia.reg

9. With Premiere not running, double-click on this file.

10. It displays a warning about registry editing. Click Yes

,

To move any already-created Media Cache files out of the roaming profile, to the external media

(If you haven't used Premiere to create anything yet, this will be empty or not present)

1. Open explorer

2. In file path, paste the following:

%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Common\

2b. If using redirected AppData in Group Policy you will want to use that path here instead. For example if AppData is redirected to the network home drive N:, the path would be:

%HOMEDRIVE%\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Common

3.Select the following and then press Control-X to Cut

Media Cache

Media Cache Files

Thumbnail Cache

4. Go to your flash drive, to F:\Premiere (or your drive letter) and press Control-V to Paste

Premiere will now use your external flash storage for the Media Cache, and won't complain about it at all.

Be sure to:

- Inset your Media Cache USB drive before opening Premiere.

- Close Premiere before removing your USB drive

- Always use "Safely Remove Hardware" tool to prevent USB corruption.

There is probably a way to automate this as a logon script via Active Directory and Group Policy for a group of lab computers running Adobe Premiere. All lab computers built the same way will typically use the same removable media drive letter, so the registry editing script does not need to be modified for each desktop.