Could not initialize Photoshop because the disk is not available

JS
Posted By
Jon_Shippam
Jul 21, 2008
Views
1275
Replies
12
Status
Closed
Ramón G Castañeda – 4:53am Apr 12, 08 PST (#72 of 98) Jon,

If you can find a way of duplicating the issue reliably, I’m sure Adobe would love to hear how. I’ve never seen the issue myself.

OK, I think I’ve found a way to duplicate the issue reliably. On an Intel Mac, create an ‘Apple Partition Map’ on a hard drive. Set this disk to be the Photoshop scratch disk – it will give the message "Could not initialize Photoshop because the disk is not available".

If the drive is formatted using GUID (which according to the information in Disk Utility should only be necessary if using it as a startup drive) then the problem does not occur.

For the drive with the Apple Partition Map, setting the drive to ‘ignore permissions’ then allows it to work.

I only discovered this today, after reformatting one of my hard drives. Having been new to Intel Macs, when I first got my Mac Pro in February I formatted the non-startup drives using the Apple Partition Map. When I reformatted a hard drive yesterday, I decided to use GUID. When testing this with Photoshop, this drive works fine as a scratch disk without having to set ‘ignore permissions’

I hope this information helps (both Adobe and users) – is posting this here enough, or do I need to send Adobe feedback via some other route?
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R
Ram
Jul 22, 2008
Use the Contact button at the top of this page to submit a bug report.
DL
Donald_Laidlaw
Oct 10, 2008
I have had this problem for ages, and the solution by SpirOs by way of Jon Shippam solved it for me. Not only that, but generating a new UUID also fixed another problem I was having with Microsoft Word in the Office 2008 Suite.

Thanks guys!
SP
Susan_Phillips
Oct 14, 2008
Good news, times two !

1) A simple solution to this problem is to press CMD-ALT while starting PS, which will cause you to be prompted to change your scratch disks. Simply take away the offending disk, and PS will start happily. No reinstalls, no lost preferences.

2) It seems that a major source of noise on these forums is promising to write less. Now maybe we’ll be able to find the posts that actually have solutions in them, instead of patronizing insults.
AS
Ann_Shelbourne
Oct 14, 2008
Your first paragraph was helpful — but don’t you think that your second paragraph was just unnecessary NOISE?
R
Ram
Oct 14, 2008
No reinstalls, no lost preferences.

But not a solution either if the offending disk happens to be the one you intend on using as primary scratch disk. :/

At best, that is a temporary workaround until you determine why the disk is being rejected or you fix it by ignoring ownership of that volume.
E
Eric_
Oct 24, 2008
Just got this by installing Flash CS3 and all updates on someone’s machine. Gads I love the Adobe Install and Update software (NOT)…

At any rate, the permanent fix for me was to go into /var/tmp and make sure that the owner of the folders.501 folder was in fact the user. Somehow something changed it to be owned by root while the Installer was busy poking its fingers in all the pies.

cd /var/tmp;
chown shortusername folders.501;

where shortusername is the name associated with that user id.

Hope this helps others…
Eric.
AS
Ann_Shelbourne
Oct 25, 2008
All that you probably needed to do was to to run Repair Permissions both before and, particularly, AFTER installing Flash.

Do the same thing when you install CS4 because there seems to be a problem with the Flash permissions.
E
Eric_
Oct 25, 2008
I tried repairing permissions first, but it didn’t fix the issue. It DID repair some Shockwave 10 permissions, IIRC but nothing in /var/tmp.
H
hiponadobe
Nov 1, 2008
I must say this scratch file error message was extremely frustrating. I appreciate the effort to be civil, but I really could not understand how Adobe would allow one change (switching a scratch drive) to render the program inoperable without any clear fix. Ugh..

Anyway, I did find a quick fix apparently for any Vista users out there:

1) Open Windows Explorer – Find the scratch disk in question.
2) Click on Security
3) At the bottom of the "Group or user names:" section click "EDIT" to change permissions.
4) Be sure "Everyone" is highlighted in the "Group or user names:" section and then go below and check "Full Control."

Click OK and Apply, etc. The drive runs through anything on there and I assume updates permissions. After it was done I was able to open Photoshop.

Whew! Lack of sleep not helping my patience level…but happy to be working again.
R
Ram
Nov 1, 2008
I did find a quick fix apparently for any Vista users out there:

None here. This is the Photoshop Macintosh forum. :/
D
DavidRBooth
Nov 19, 2008
I to had this "Could not initialize Photoshop because the disk is not available," problem in CS4 under Mac OS X 10.5.5. Fixede it uisng the free utility Batchmod and chnaged the owner of the disc to my admin user. Good way to do it if uisng the terminal with commnad lines is too intimidating. After changing the owner, Photoshop CS4 started without the offending error message
T
tevan
Dec 10, 2008
thank you Spir0s — creating a new UUID fixed the problem for me.

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