I posted a message but got no reply, it’s regarding scratch disks. It’s rather urgent that I get this solved. If anyone has any clues please let me know. The original message is dux0r "Redirecting scratch disks" 4/18/04 11:25pm </cgi-bin/webx?50>
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The reason you didn’t get a speedy reply is because most of us were a sleep when you posted in the middle of the night!!
I believe ray is correct, running the scratch disk on a network drive probably isn’t going to work, and if it did it would be woefully slow.
I suggest you get an external hard drive, such as a USB or Firewire drive (which you get depends on your hardware config) and use that as the scratch disk. Presumably you can setup this extra drive as writable drive. You would only need as many drives as concurrent users of Elements. These drives are easily relocatable from machine to machine so wouldn’t necesairly need one for every computer in your lab, just those designated for Elements.
If you have a choice I would opt for Firewire for increased performance. However USB 2 is becoming more ubiquitous and may be the best option looking forward.
JP is correct that it is not possible to configure Elements or Photoshop to use a network scratch disk. Indeed, some external drives have not been useable as scratch disks, because of the drivers used to access them. Have you consider re-partitioning the C drive of the school machines to create a scratch partition ? It would be some work , but it could be dedicated to Photoshop Elements use and writing to it wouldn’t be such a security problem as C drive access.
Thanks for the advice, yeah I’m over here in Australia while most of you are in America I’d imagine!
Umm, not worrying about the speed issues across the network, is it possible to make elements think that the h:/ is actually the c:/ ? maybe using the net use command or subst command in DOS. This would fix my problems and all students to write to their disk. I beleive the network can handle it as not many would be using it at once…
My mom’s from Brisbane and I wish you luck . I just don’t hold out much hope. Unless the "drive" shows up in the Elements list of possible scratch disks, it just won’t be possible.
I don’t think DOS subst command would be any help, because network wouldn’t be present when it was run. And running it after the fact, like in a batch file, wouldn’t do anything but change the drive letter designation. It would still be perceived as network drive if that even worked.
A quick Google for – photoshop network scratch – didn’t reveal that anyone has ever made it work.
Did a quick check with two macs (OS9 & OS X) in a peer to peer network and there are no problems there. I shall try to remember to check at work tomorrow on a full blown pc network. I do wonder, though, if it’s not a question of user rights. Your users will require full rights to the entire scratch disk. Well actually I think ‘everyone’ will need full rights to it.
This is what I’m trying to do, apparently Elements doesn’t remember anything but the drive letter ie. No folder or location information is retained so if I net use c: for h: then make a package from elements it should allow it to be changed inside the program once it’s deployed. That’s my aim…
The easiest workaround, use SUBST to a new folder on the C: drive. Create a folder and give the students write permit to that folder, run SUBST X: C:\newfolder and then use the new X: in Elements.
Hi again, Sorry for misleading you. I made a mistake and mixed up an alias to a scratch disk and another disk. After trying on a pc net (which dind’t work) I tried again on the macs and can’t get either to work.
