It’s possible that the Photoshop install wrote to a sector of hard drive that went bad. How old is the drive?
Shite hanford. I just ordered PSCS today and you’re making me real nervous. I hope someone can help you real soon.
I know the Macromedia authorization process writes to an unused sector of the drive, and Im wondering if Adobes does, too.
I brought this point up in the Lounge under Macromedia Activation topic (and elsewhere).
If it turns out to be the culprit, I’ll not be surprised.
The drive is 1 year old. 100gb drive.
Okay, well I was able to get my PC to boot … here’s what I did:
1. I went into the bios and disabled the drive in question. Not quite sure if this worked… I mean the menu says "off" but the drive is still visible and I’m able to get files off of it.
2. I skipped over the consistency checker of drive f: during boot up of my PC, but let c: get checked (it worked fine). I had to skip F becuase it kept locking up.
3. Right when the desktop popped up, but before the system try was filled, I CTRL-ALT-DELed to get to get the task manager. I switched to the "Processes" tab.
4. As new processes were added, I’d look at them and if I reconized them as system tray processes, I killed them using the task manager. I killed as many as I could. One of the processes I killed was something called "AdobeGammaLoa" and the rest was truncated.
The system booted up, and I’m currently backing up everything off of the F: drive. No word yet on whether or not the problem is solved; I’m not going to try to reboot or do a Windows Consistency Check (as opposed to the dos one at boot up) until I have all my important files backed up (I make backups on a weekly basis. Tonight’s the day I normally do it. )
PS: When installing PSCS it said that the Gamma settings were read-only and asked if I wanted to over-write it. I said yes. I wonder if this has to do with anything? I killed more processes than the AdobeGammaLoa thing so I’m not sure if that what was causing the problem.
I’ll keep us all posted with the latest …
One of the processes I killed was something called "AdobeGammaLoa" and the rest was truncated.
Yep Adobe Gamma Loader. It may be as simple as a corrupted monitor profile, although I wouldn’t expect it to stop Windows from booting. Try re-creating your monitor profile with Adobe gamma in the control panel.
Keep us posted, hanford. I’d be curious to know if anything besides a bad drive can cause the consistency checker to lock up.
Quick update:
Windows died while trying to back up some files. I got my super-important files backed up, though.
On Reboot, I had to do the same process again: killing processes in the Task Manager.
Killing Adobe Gamma Loader did NOT solve it this time. I’m not sure what I’m killing to make it work. I have a suspect though: iTunes.
I have deinstalled Itunes, and I’ve also disabled the "Adobe LM Service" (does anyone know what that is?). I have not rebooted since then, since I’m back to backing up files. I’ll keep people posted.
~Hanford
I’d hazard a guess that LM="License Manager"?
Who knows what LM is. it’s in the Adobe Shared resources folder. I did a google search and found nothing about it. So I don’t know what it does. I just happened to see it in the services window in control panel so I disabled it. EDIT: I did find Adobe LiveMotion, so perhaps this is a liveMotion viewer or player? I don’t own LiveMotion.
PS: When I say "CS" in this topic I mean Photoshop CS and not the Creative Suite as a whole.
Latest update:
The drive is working again. I can boot without a lockup. And Photoshop CS is working fine.
The only thing I did since message 4 was:
1. Deinstalled iTunes (it was initializing stuff on boot, and I was trying to narrow down the problem).
2. Disabled the Adobe LM Service (But it seems to have turned itself back on. I wonder what it does?)
3. Ran Windows Error Checker on the drive in question (I did this by right-clicking on the drive, clicking on Tools, then clicking on "check for errors"). It didn’t report any problems.
When I rebooted, the consistency checker was able to check the entire drive and repair whatever it found.
I’m not sure what happened or if CS had anything to do with it (it doesn’t seem to be, now).
Thanks for everyone’s help.
Glad you got it working, hanford. Did you manually set the consistency checker to run at boot?
—
Rick Moore
Barnes Gromatzky Kosarek Architects
(512) 476 7133
(512) 478 2624 FAX
www.bgkarchitects.com
Hmm. When you can afford the two hours or so, you’ll want to do a boot-time chkdsk with the surface scan turned on ("chkdsk /f /r c:"). It really did sound like, from the symptoms, that a few sectors on the hard drive flaked out (not uncommon, and sometimes the information can be recovered, and they usually get remapped without anything going real funny).
If you’re running XP, another thing to try if you’re ever in a similar situation where boot is going funny is to remove all the files in the pre-cache directory (C:/Windows/Prefetch). These are the files that Windows sees get read on startup, copied into continguous areas in a section of the disk in order to speed up boot.
Please let us know if you see any further problems.
-Scott
If you’re running XP, another thing to try if you’re ever in a similar situation where boot is going funny is to remove all the files in the pre-cache directory (C:/Windows/Prefetch).
Excellent tip scott! Thank you! Are they replaced there automatically after a successful boot? (a’la Windows File Protection)? Or do they need to be replaced manually? Do you have any msdn links to info on the prefetch folder?
Scott,
thanks for the tips. I need to run chkdsk, didn’t know it was a command line thing.
I’ll keep you posted.
Great job on Photoshop CS! I’m loving it!
~Hanford
The prefetch directory will be reassembled next successful boot. No worries. I saw the tip in one of the WinXP hints mailers I get that I don’t have anymore, so I don’t have any good references.
Hanford, if you’re on XP (I think 2K has both checkboxes as well, but I’m not sure), in the Check Disk dialog, "Automatically Fix" corresponds to the /f switch, and "Scan for bad sectors" matches /r. So, you can do it from the GUI if you want. I’m just a command line weenie from way back, so that’s always my first reaction :-).
-Scott
Hi Scott,
I ran chkdsk on my PC last night. It seems to be working fine. I could not find the program icon for a GUI version of Checkdisk on my Windows 2000 machine. It was not in the System Tools program group. I did a search in Windows help (yes, i’m the person they made Windows help for) and it only came up as a command line tool.
Anyway, it rebooted and then did the comprehensive scan on bootup. Do you know if it writes out a log file of what it’s done to the drive?
Thanks for the help. I don’t think it has anything to do with PSCS, so I’m *very* greatful for your time.
~Hanford
thanks for the info scott. i’ll dig deeper into msdn.
dave
If it’s anything like scandisk in previous OS’s, then yes. In the windows root folder, there’s a Scandisk.log.
The GUI version can be found by selecting a drive in Explorer, getting the Properties (by right-clicking and selecting it from the menu or hitting alt-enter), going to the Tools page, and doing Check Now.
Yeah, I thin it writes a log into the Windows directory, but I’m not sure.
-Scott
