Hi – I just found this group. I am having similar problems. I try to save in the midst of everything seeming to be working fine (previous saves in the session) and get the ‘can’t save due to disk error’ message. I tried saving many different ways (though not a .tiff and I don’t understand what you mean by saving to a different drive), but always the same message. Yesterday I decided to quit and lose my lastest revisions – Instead I lost the entire file. POOF! The old version is gone totally.
I ran ‘repair disk permissions’ and restarted PS to try a test document. A few seconds in it unexpectedly quit after something funky happening to the text I was typing.
I do not have Norton installed – I was advised it would cause lots of problems on my machine. I am on a new eMac (January 2004), 10.3.3 and PS7.
I previously had problems with my Appleworks program – which turned out to be caused by a corrupt Font – something I never would have figured out without the help of that forum. Any advise is greatly appreciated!
Hi again. I just remembered another bit of info. I had installed Norton anti-virus on my eMac. When I tried to start it it opened PhotoShop instead and said it could not open the file. I tried it twice with the same result before uninstalling Norton and getting the warning not to use it on my computer. Could that have caused my problems? Thanks.
You probably need neither — there are less Mac users than Windows ones so evil minds find it less amusing to put the effort into creating viruses for them.
As the problem showed up for you when you were working with type, you may well have a corrupt or conflicting font.
But all of the comments, made earlier in this thread, that refer to Hard Drives are applicable. Run Disk Warrior for a start and consider buying a second internal HD to use for Photoshop’s scratch disk.
I think there may in fact be an undetermined problem other than hardware. Well maybe it is partially the hardware. I think a good work around if you experience this is to save ass a tiff and not a ,psd.
Thank you for all the feedback. I don’t have disk warrior – looks like I better get it.
Has anyone else with this problem ever totally lost a file like I did? I have never had this happen on any computer in any program before. I didn’t just lose recent revisions, I lost every trace of the file ever existing. It had been created, saved and closed in previous sessions. It had been saved at least once befoe I encountered the disk error in that session. When I could not save due to disk error I quit, thinking I would only loose recent revisions. I lost everything.
Yes, I had no backup – I learned my lesson. But it concerns me that this may not be a simple problem or software fatigue.
Run DiskWarrior before you do another thing — you may find that your Directory was scrambled and that your file will reappear after running DiskWarrior.
Norton Utilities also includes a file recovery module which might help if you haven’t over-written the file in the meantime.
My ‘computer-adviser’ just gave me the same advice as you did, Ann. I will run a disk repair asap. He also suggested I reinstall PS in case my short episode with trying to open Norton and having it fire up PS instead (before I uninstalled Norton) could have effected PS somehow. Also, I had been letting my computer sleep for days rather than restarting, which I will stop doing. And I will try saving as a tiff next time the problem arises. – Just writing this in case it might be helpful to anyone else who comes along as all of your feedback has been helpful to me. Thanks everybody!
For those that are experiencing this issue with PS CS, please let me know where the original file was opened from. Did you open the file from your primary drive (local drive with OS on it)? Did you open it from a secondary IDE drive? Was the file opened from an external drive? Or was it a new file that you created during your PS session?
I am using PS 7.0. I have had it happen several times. Files were always opened from my primary drive. I do not remember if some of them were new files created during that PS session or if all had been created on prior PS sessions or in other programs.
I have the same problem after a waking from sleep on a G5- all other applications don’t have a problem saving to the same local directory except for photoshop cs. Saving to TIFF causes the same problem. Most of the time I can save to an external firewire dirve- then copy the file in the finder to the local directory I was intending to save in.
I continue to have this problem every once in a while. It occurs when saving from the main hard drive. I can usually save it to an external drive, but one time that wouldn’t work either.
I’ve run disk warrior and the drive checks out OK. It appears from the postings here that this is a software issue, not a problem with the hard drive. Is Adobe listening?
check your ram. I have several g4 machines, and tried to swich ram on some of the machines. And the result is: The most effected machine, which corrupted my .psd files i working fine now. I will let it run for a couble of days to see if the problem i fixed.
When you check your ram, be absolutly sure your ram is exacly the same type. i have 2 visuel identical ram from the same manifacture with same labels and all, but if you really look in to it, it´s not the same. I found to absolutly identical ram, and installed in the machine above, and i thinkk it fixed the problem
it this works, i think the conclution is a hardware and a software failure
Could you explain how you know it’s not software related? The main constant with those having this problem is that it only occurs when trying to save a PS file. If it’s not related to PS why wouldn’t it occur in other programs? Could it be that PS is more demanding on the system resources and so triggers the problem but is not the source of the problem?
Will — first, because everyone is not seeing it. That means it is most likely not Photoshop itself. Also, I’ve done enough trouble shooting to recognize patterns.
Yes, it may be that Photoshop is more demanding, or that Photoshop calls some particular API that shows the problem on your system (like async I/O).
Isn’t that sort of like saying "It’s not the fault of the peanuts, themselves" when somebody dies from the peanut allergy, since not everybody exhibits those symptoms? True, technically it’s the allergy that killed them, but I should think people with the allergy would want to know that the food they eat contains something which could kill them.
If Photoshop is the only application that causes the error, I should think that the developers would want to find out why. If for no reason other than to post a note in the next update’s Read Me file stating that "Photoshop may create disk errors upon saving to systems which use …" (whatever else is on these people’s system). It sounds a tad flippant to shrug it off with a "Not My Problem" dismissal.
jonf – in that case it is NOT the fault of the peanuts, but on whomever ate them or whomever packaged them.
Yes, we’d love to know why "only" Photoshop shows an error. But that happens all the time — and it almost always gets tracked to bad hardware, bad installs, bad drivers, etc. And we can hardly list all possibly causes….
was working with a .PSD file (120 MB) and it wouldn’t save because of a disk error, i quit PS (7.0.1) and the file isn’t even on my hard drive anymore from where it was originally opened! i repaired permissions, ran disk warrior, and restarted. same problem came up again when i tried to save again. this only happens in PS. i don’t think this is any hardware problem.
Adobe, any solutions?
my machine: 17" iMac 1 GHz G4 80 GB hard drive 1 GB RAM
Have you read the different threads dealing with this issue? The issue has been discussed numerous times here. (Do a forum search on the error message you’re getting. ) If so, what steps have you taken to troubleshoot your problem so far?
Did you verify the names of the file as well as all folders and drives in the path?
ya, i searched for "disk error" in the forums. all solutions suggested (disk warrior, repair permissions, etc) i’ve done. i’ve manually checked permissions of all the folders in the hierarchy the .PSD file was in to make sure i had permissions to write (and i did). the name of the file had no illegal characters. as i was not able to save the file in the original location, i was able to save it on a mounted server. i can’t think of anything else to do. it doesn’t happen all the time…and i just can’t figure out what does make it happen. any ideas?
Matt — unless you save over the original file AND the disk is corrupted at exactly the right moment, Photoshop can’t delete the existing file. We do safe saves (to a temporary file) to avoid just that problem. If you save to another location, then there is no way Photoshop could delete the orignal.
I always get a disk error when saving files, which have more than 32 characters in the name, via an action. This happens regardless of target location (local, remote, second HD, etc.). The only workaround is doing a Batch and overriding the save location, but then this truncates the file name.
I don’t have PSCS for Mac yet, so I don’t know how it acts with this.
Matt — unless you save over the original file AND the disk is corrupted at exactly the right moment, Photoshop can’t delete the existing file.
I’m not Matt, but I also lost an existing file to this disk error. It was a file I had made and saved previously, was working on and saved several times in that session. Then I got the disk error and could not save it. I thought it would be ok to quit and just lose my latest changes, but instead I lost the file altogether. Repairing disk permissions, running Disk Warrior and TechTools did not bring it back.
I have since reinstalled PS, run the above repairs a couple of times and still get the disk error on occasion. I have tried saving as a tiff (as suggested by others), but never could. I cannot save as anything when I get the disk error. There is no option but to quit. Now I do always work on a copy of a file so I won’t lose the original – but I make the copy before I open it, not by trying to save in a different location.
Once again the advice of Repairing Permissions before and after upgrading the OS as well as before and after installing any software that uses an installer applies here. Yes, it sounds like "OS X voodoo", but it certainly can’t hurt and it fixes quite a number of problems in many instances.
Also, DiskWarrior is a great utility, but it does not check the physical state of the hard drive. The only way to test a hard drive with certainty is to back up everything, erase the drive and write it to zeros.
There are a number of users complaining about this error, but there is an even greater number of users who don’t see it. Recently, some Adaptec controller cards were named as causing problems.
Thank you, Ann. I did not know about 7.0.1 – I have just updated today.
Thank you, Ramon – I did not know I should Repair Permissions before and after upgrading the OS (which I have done a couple of times recently) and installing software. I will do it again now.
I don’t have Cocktail. I installed Cronnix per an article in a Mac magazine, but it does not seem to work (at least I never get the reports I set it to leave me, so I have no way of knowing if it works or not). It allowed me to change the times to when I knew my computer would be on and awake.
Learn how to optimize Photoshop for maximum speed, troubleshoot common issues, and keep your projects organized so that you can work faster than ever before!
Related Discussion Topics
Nice and short text about related topics in discussion sections