Photoshop crashed on me, and would not allow me back in. I decided to uninstall and re install, as one would. however when I try to open I get the following error message "could not initialize photoshop because the scratch discs are full" I had scratch discs set up on my other drive partitions. I am running an athlon 800 with 512mb of ram and an 80gb hard drive partitioned into 4 drives, and win2k pro. I can not work out a way of sorting the scratch discs outside of PS. Because I am using a seconhand version of PS 5.5 ( the reg was transferred to me but I don't have a manual) I have taught myself. Have tried Adobe on line help, but can't seem to get an answer to this prob. How can I set up scratch discs to get over this problem please. Can anyone help

Have you tried locating any Photoshop folders that were left over from uninstalling the program and deleting them? I seem to remember there being a preference file that is created by Photoshop, so that when you open the program your preferences load automatically. However, I cannot remember the name of the file right now. I will see what I can come up with.

the default scratch disk for photoshop is called ""Startup" which I believe is your HD with Windows on it. If you have four partitions, put your first second and third choices of scratch disk in the order of which partitions have the most free space left on them. Also, you can choose how much ram is allocated to photoshop. I usually set it to 75%, but that's just me. Also, when working on big files and whatnot, photoshop creates temp files and whatnot which sometimes don't get deleted. do a search of *.tmp files on your puter, see what turns up. Otherwise, with the system you're running, you shouldn't be having problems such as this. One of Premiere's problems had to do with having to trash the preferences file half the time so it loads properly. Maybe yer having a similar prob with photoshop...?

I can see the problem here, that u cant get into PS to change the settings. The best I can suggest is to try locate the prefs file or an ini,cfg, or similar, and try to trash that to reset the options, or edit it if possible. I know under PS Ver.6 in win2k the prefs file is stored under "C:Documents and SettingsusernameApplication DataAdobePhotoshop6.0Adobe Photoshop 6 SettingsAdobe Photoshop 6 Prefs.psp" hopefully if you trash that it will reset the options. Otherwise you could try copying the file from someone else and overwrite yours. IF you can remember how u set the scratch disks, the best is to try create at least 100-200MB of freespace on those drives, maybe it will start up. Hope this helps :)

OK here goes: In Win 2K go to Local Disk then "Documents And Settings" Look for your folder, it should have your log on name listed. Inside the folder you will see an "Application Data" folder. Look for the Adobe folder. In the Adobe folder you will see a "PhotoShop" folder. Inside that folder you will see "adobe photoshop 6 prefs.psp" Delete the file. Reboot your machine, start Photoshop and you will find yourself back at factory defaults for your settings.

Usually the main problems in photoshop is when you move stuff on the directory folders, if you move files that are needed, then photoshop will look for them, but wont find them, and that's the main reason why it crashes usually!!!