I am running Photoshop CS on OS-X 10.3. Frequently after Photoshop has been running for a while, when I try to save my files to the main disk (where the files live), I get "Could not save <filename> because of a disk error." If I quit photoshop and restart, the problem goes away for a while. Fortunately, I have a Firewire disk that Photoshop will happily save to, so I don’t lose my work (at least so far), but this is very troubling.
I search the online technical documents, but the only reference to this error is for network or removable disks, and I’m having this problem with the main system disk.
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The error message most likely means what it says; you have disk problems. Provided you don’t have any non-UNIX characters in the name of anything in the path (files, folders, drives), you should check your hard drive. Boot from the install CD and Repair Disk with Apple’s Disk Utility. Then Repair Permissions. You can (and should) repair permissions with Disk Utility while booted from your main drive, but Repair Disk is only available when booted from a different disk, like the CD.
I would also run DiskWarrior.
Try Repairing Permissions (with Apple’s Disk Utility) BEFORE and AFTER any system upgrade as well as BEFORE and AFTER installing any software that uses an installer.
I know it sounds like OS X voodoo, and it is; but it fixes and prevents a bunch of problems.
Additionally, if your machine does not run 24/7 so that it runs the daily, weekly and monthly Cron Scripts in the middle of the night as intended, run Cocktail (shareware) as well.
I, too, encountered this issue on my dual 2ghz G5. But it only occured after it stayed on a screensaver over 3 day weekends (for me, that’s every weekend)
I have seen this on two different machines. Neither of which have bad hard drives. I have no solution. Just wanted to chime in and state that it has happened to me as well. Never seen this before photoshop CS.
Ann and Ramon are correct — suspect a problem with your hardware and take appropriate action to protect your data and troubleshoot the source.
But it’s understandably suspicious that the problem only seems to occur in PS. Can any of the experts (who know more than me on that subject) help them understand why a problem like this only occurs in a single application? Can we absolutely rule out the possibility that PS might be damaging the file and reading it as a bad disk?
It has been discussed ad nauseam here. Photoshop drives the hardware and software to its limits, harder than any other application. Even bad RAM that can survive hours of testing with RAM testing hardware is often unmasked in Photoshop for the first time.
As to your last question, no possibility can or should ever be ruled out.
Photoshop drives the hardware and software to its limits
I know that’s the reason, but I don’t have the technical background to explain it. Intuitively, if there’s a bad sector on a disk it would seem that it would show up any time any application tried to write to that sector. E.g., a bad floppy disk will give you disk errors no matter what you try to save to it. I’ve never been clear why PS can reveal disk errors that don’t show up even when running other system-intensive software… although I’ll admit that it does. My *guess* is that PS is constrained to save certain data to sequential sectors and sometimes is forced by a combination of virtual memory requirements and remaining available sectors to write to bad sectors, where other software is able to skip those sectors. But I’m probably *way* off on that, so I was hoping an expert could clarify.
The difference between errors on a floppy and a hard drive malfunction, is that the read/write heads of the hard drive could be misbehaving erratically when pushed to the max. I’m not saying this is the expert answer you want, just something to think about other than bad sectors.
I’ve never been clear why PS can reveal disk errors that don’t show up even when running other system-intensive software…
Such as…? Most of us don’t use apps much tougher on a system than Photoshop. Think: extensive use of RAM, scratch discs, CPU processing power, hard drive seeks/read/writes, and everything that holds it all together. Any shortcoming of your system is likely to be revealed with Photoshop.
Such as music or video editing software. These can easily be 200 Mb files (and larger) and require huge amounts of RAM and virtual memory space.
And yes, they also result in errors that don’t show up with less demanding software. For some peculiar reason though, it seems like they often appear to be *different* errors than those that show up in PS. Maybe caused by the same hardware problems, but the error messages or symptoms are different enough that it can be tempting to suspect the software first.
we have had 2 g5 motherboards that were screwed pass that both apple’s user hardware tests and the engineer hardware tests supplied by apple.
Quite frankly its pathetic in this day an age for a machine to pass these tests that cant save a PS file properley or cant burn a dvd or whose ram amount varies from slot to slot.
The long and the short of it…apples hardware tests are CRAP! you may as well use divining rods…
check cables, reseat ram, format reinstall…if it still does it throw the POS back to apple.
One mistake that many people do is spend thousands on their new computers, and then decide to skimp with bargain, generic RAM. Spend a few (just a few) bucks more and be sure that you get RAM matched to your SPECIFIC Macintosh model, and matched to each other. Be particulary wary of dealers offering "free" RAM upgrades. Unless you know that what they’re giving you is major brand RAM specified for YOUR computer, skip the freebie, and see if they’ll give you another offer, such as a free spindle or two or three of major brand CD or DVD blanks. Or a scanner or printer. You get the idea.
And then buy the good RAM you need elsewhere. If you need sources and brands, we can offer recommendations.
Thanks for all the replies, but so far I’m having a hard time buying the explanations. First, if I quit Photoshop and restart, it will happily save to the files it complained about 30 seconds previously. It’s not that I get errors intermittantly (which I could believe was an impending disk failure), but that after PS has been running for a while, it happens consistently. Then if I restart PS, it’s happy to save to that file.
Also, knowing a fair amount about UNIX internals, Photoshop shouldn’t be more demanding when saving a file than any other application. It should just be making a system call that does all the work. It may be that any other application would display this same behavior but that I don’t run most applications for days on end.
My wild-ass guess is that Photoshop keeps the file open the whole time it’s open in Photoshop and then tries to write back to the same file handle. If some cron job has done something to the file, the write might fail. When you restart Photoshop, it forces it to re-open the file, so everything is OK.
I did run fix disk and fix permissions, though, as suggested by the first responder. If I don’t get any more problems, I’ll bow down to the OS-X voodoo gods….
If Photoshop says there is a disk error, then there probably IS a disk error.
I’m just having a hard time believing that. It just happened again. Photoshop was running for a long time. I opened a new file, made an edit and tried to save. I got the error. Quit Photoshop; reopened the file; made the edit; saved no problem. How does restarting Photoshop get rid of the disk error? How is it that no other program has trouble saving files?
Andrew…what you describe exactly replicates when one of our motherboards when tits up.
We could save all day long, 0 problems, then one day we got one, a month passed, another, then a week passed, another, then a day would pass, then every hour…the longer we ran PS for, the more we filled up the drive, the more it would corrupt files.
NOT ONE APPLE TEST REVEALED THE PROBLEM ! but as we got it consistantly failing under test conditions it went back.
cable & hardware check, format, reinstall…run…if it still falls over send it back or be prepared to keep losing data and people losing interest because you wont take people’s advice 😉
A fragged drive shouldnt cause disk errors on a good system, it just slows things down.
After having several machines go south in the last decade of using apples and PS, i know that ps’s hardware error messages are 99.99% accurate….from bad scsi connections, bad blocks, loose cables, dicky PSU’s, bad ram, bad mb’s…its picked them all up on an otherwise running fine system
Quitting and restarting PS can force it to save to a new section of your disk, since as you run PS it’s constantly using HD space for virtual memory. So if there’s a bad sector or block it might show up after running PS for a while, then seem to go away after a re-start.
It’s a natural tendency to disbelieve the solution that’s likely to cost you the most money and create the biggest bother. It may be worth exploring other possibilities, but when important data is at stake ultimately the cheapest solution is the one that actually fixes the problem before disaster strikes.
I get this error infrequently, but I get it as well. It happens in Windows, too. My guess is that something happens to PS’s disk cache, because it usually happens when PS has been open for a very long time (like days).
Neil. I wasn’t asking for anyone to solve my problem, so I didn’t see the need to post specs. I run Panther on a dual-G5 with 2gig RAM, no haxies or other non-Apple OS goodies, and on a 1.25 G4 iMac with 1gig, and on a Dell P4 3.0 with 2gig RAM and XP Pro. I get this bug most freqently on the iMac, but the frequency is very, very low, perhaps once every other month.
With Windows, the error comes up as "Photoshop could not save the file because an error occurred." It happens only after a long time of PS being open, days or weeks, with screensavers and such having been on and off, and other apps opened and closed. It hasn’t been a bother to me all that much, but I would say that all the "your computer is dying", "it’s bad hardware", or "you don’t do enough system maintenance" sorts of responses are a bit too self-assured. Given other apps that don’t lose the ability to save files even when open for days or weeks, and given that PS is one of the few apps that maintains its own virtual memory instead of having the OS handle it, and given the sort of disk activity that constantly occurs, especially under OS X, then I don’t see much controversial about the idea that common circumstance can cause this error, and it not being the fault of hardware operating outside of spec, or the user. There’s nothing particularly stunning about a bug that manifests once in tens of thousands of hours of use: don’t feel like anyone’s attacking PS over it.
harry, chill…no-one’s getting on your back, we’re offering advice based on probably at least 50 years experience of PS here.
Like several have said, PS hammers machines (or can) to quite some degree, AE does as well…in fact quite a few apps can really drive a system bloody hard. PS is by no means the only app to have its own VM system, that hammers drives or sometimes has a spaz fit after being open for a while.
I suspect you may have some hardware problem, could be a bad block, could be a fridge on your wiring circuit spiking your power supply, could be voodoo on a small island in the middle of the atlantic causing static…but there’s 1000’s of users going through here and if it was PS banging out errors like that i think this thread would be just a weeny bit bigger. 10’s of 1000’s of hours is nothing in what PS’s hours are across the world every week.
PS is a wet dream compared to some of the raggedy stuff that tries to pass itself off as applications i use (and cheaper!)
My suggestion, ignore what you like, dont run PS for days…problem solved. 🙂
Or when you have 1/2 day, check everythings still in one piece, nuke the disk from orbit…reinstall…see if it comes back. If it does, see how many more people have complained about it here and make your own mind up.
I have over a decade of professional PS experience myself, thanks for asking. I don’t often run PS for days, but sometimes it happens: left on over the weekend, or whatever. I have no idea if people often leave images open in PS for days, but your supposition that the hours of PS use around the world are a counter argument isn’t really germane unless you have an idea of how many of those users leave PS open for extremely long periods. If the majority of folks shut down PS at the end of the day, then they aren’t really testing PS for the presence of a bug that manifests in that fashion.
But I’m not bent out of shape about this: I was merely pointing out that several other posters have experienced this problem, and the advice coming from many here is very extreme. Fresh OS install after zero-writing a hard drive? Sending them off on the "you can’t prove a negative proposition" RAM exchange? That there’s very likely one of several expensive problems as the cause?
At least three other posters have said they observe this behavior, one remarking that it happens on two different systems, and I’ve seen it on three, with both Windows and OS X. I run Maya on the same G5 and Dell machines that I run PS on, and Maya never has a problem saving a file: my instincts tell me Maya is harder on a system than PS.
I’m just saying: sufficiently complicated software has bugs. More than one person experiences this problem with PS. I would not be surprised to find that the problem lay with the software. That’s all.
I was merely pointing out that several other posters have experienced
this problem, and the advice coming from many here is very extreme.
I’ve seen Disk Errors myself and have had bad hard drives, bad cables, bad installs, bad firmware, and bad ram. Resetting the logic board has also fixed similar flaky disk behavior…
My experience – with pointing to software (bugs) – is that we would see dozens, hundreds or thousands of people here with the same problem – so I would be surprised if the problem was OS/Photoshop.
I run stuff like Max and Maya as well on pc’s…maya’s processor intensive, but it doesn’t push ram and inevitably hardrives anywhere near as PS does day after day. In fact Maya tends to get a bit fluffy around the high ram marks as well, but you can get under the bonnet an sort that. But AFAIK maya doesn’t talk to drives in the way that PS does.
Back in the old scsi days with async plugins etc it was PS that threw up hardware errors, but then they were hardware errors not just bad programming, every hardware error i have has been the same. I had a machine that would only error on PS files once in a blue moon…but after changing the ram, the mb, the drive, the case! the processor…nothing changed…until the PSU was changed and it went away permanently. Thats extreme yes, but the PSU wasnt giving up enough power to the drive when the machine was under load (not necessarily hot)..the tests didnt find it because the tests didnt put the machine under load like PS was.
Now lots of people experienced the "your file hass be corrupted" blah blah, but I actually went to the lengths to nail the thing. I’ve seen the error on different machines as well, and different things caused it.
Same thing Here, I have a New Powerbook, 1.5 gig cpu and two gigs of ram. Everything is fine if I don’t stress the system….like work on one image at a time.
Butttt……
If for example, I open 12 images that are 50 or 60 megs, for comparison and evaluation, I find that dragging the lasoo tool becomes slow but I also find that I can only save to my external firewire drive, because saving to the Powerbook HD comes up with a message….can’t save because of disc error.
My powerbook is less than two weeks old, Am I just asking to much of it, or do I need to get a replacement??
Actually, Tom’s problem is the very issue described in the title of the original post:
tom holland writes: I can only save to my external firewire drive, because saving to the Powerbook HD comes up with a message….can’t save because of disc error.
Sorry for being so silent for a while; I was on vacation. I may not have 50 years of experience with PS, but I do have about 20 years of experience writing software for computers, from microcode to applications. I understand that hardware can fail and fail in strange ways, but Occam’s Razor says the simplest solution is usually correct. It seems to me much more likely that there is a bug in PS than that no other application or diagnostic finds an error with any hardware, but PS does. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it doesn’t seem the most likely.
Let me again recap the symptoms:
– If Photoshop is open for a long time, it refuses to save to the main HD, with the error "Could not save <filename> because of a disk error." – It does not matter if the file in question has been open a long time or recently opened. – If I try to save to another drive, it works fine. – No files are ever corrupted.
For those of you that insist it’s a hardware problem, what should I do? If no diagnostic shows an issue, I can’t get any warranty support, right? Are you suggesting that I should pay to start swaping components and see if this problem goes away? That’s just too radical a solution. I’ll certainly keep running diagnostics, but until I have proof, it’s just much more believable that PS has a bug.
I’m not totally ingoring your advice. I’m super paranoid about losing data. All my unrecoverable data is backup up regularly (and even rotated off site weekly). I even store the MD5 hash of each file and check it weekly, so that I can detect bad sectors and other subtle failures. None of the files has even been found to be corrupted.
I’ve gotten part of what I wanted out of this exchange, which is that other people see the same thing. Since there’s an easy work-around: save to the other disk then re-start PS, I guess I’ll just ignore it for now. Re-installing the OS is no easier now that if the disk fails catastrophically, and since I don’t believe that will get rid of the problem, I’ll choose to make that investment only when it becomes clear that it is necessary.
If my hard drive does indeed fail soon, I’ll be happy to eat crow here.
Andrew
PS to Tom Holland: I doubt that you’d be able to get Apple to believe it’s a hardware problem, but if you do, please let me know.
Andrew…if your feeling adventurous…swap the drives…copy everything from one to the other and vice versa…if it gives the error on the new drive but saves to the old then that would indicate a bug/error…if it still wont save on the old, then that would indicate a HW fault to me.
No-one is saying PS is bug proof, what we’re saying is that thoughout everyones experience here, when PS complains of a hardware error or a file system error it seems to have spoken the truth in every case.
Perhaps this is a new bug, only if someone that has it tests it will we find out.
PS and the machine are open for a while, perhaps doing nothing…then you tell it to save, but the disks have gone for a snooze…PS cant save to the 1st disk because its still waking up so it throws up an error, but by the time you baulk at the error and save to another disk the other disk has woken up.
This may tie in with the laptop problem as well because laptops tend to have more agressive sleep times especially when running off the battery (this is true on PC laptops, i expect Mac laptops may be the same)
