Photoshop/PC hell ...... please help !!!

[strobeless]

Well the problem returned with a vengeance a few months ago, shortly after I last posted. Couldn't even save a file in Photoshop...

I realize this is an old thread. If you're still out there having trouble...

Photoshop often fails to save files when it does not have appropriate scratch disk allocation. Most Photoshop Heavyweights still use a dedicated scratch disk, with nothing on it, reserved solely for photoshop scratch.

Generally speaking, you want to assign as many scratch disks as possible, in descending order from the drives with the most available space first to the drives with the least space last. You can find scratch disk allocation in Photoshop Prefs. It used to be that you'd never want to use your start-up drive as Scratch Disk, but as of late, (CS2,3) Photoshop seems to like having the startup drive as scratch disk #1. You might have to experiment around a bit.

Similarly bridge has cache settings in it's prefs. You might futz with those a bit too, or read up on how the cache affects bridge. The CS2 Bridge was riddled with problems on both Mac and PC, with CS3 they fixed most issues on Mac, but left the PC fix for later versions, that alone might be your biggest issue with bridge.

 

[AndyT]

Replacing the motherboard seems to have done the trick. I allocated the scratch disk to an idle dedicated disk, works fine.

Thanks for posting, every bit of info helps.

 

[strobeless]

Cool, I'm glad you checked back in, one never knows if old threads get revisited. I only mentioned it because failing to save a file is a the "classic" scratch disk symptom. Too bad you had to switch out motherboards. Do you mean that your mother board actually failed, or did you switch it for something more powerful?

 

[AndyT]

It was the SATA controller on the motherboard that failed. If I had known to check the event log in Windows I would have found the problem long ago. The first thing that was reported was a SATA controller error followed by a "Bad block error" on any drive, seemingly at random.