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Thanks for posting, Chris. Unfortunately, trashing my prefs didn’t fix the problem. Likewise, reinstalling the app didn’t fix the problem. What finally fixed the problem was uninstalling the app completely and then installing it all over again. What a beating!
NOTE TO ALL: NEVER EVER EVER choose something other than your boot drive as your primary scratch disk. I’m convinced that this is where all the nonsense started.
Kevin, Did you follow the directions in the FAQs for trashing prefs? Trashing prefs will always reset the scratch disk. Reinstalling without trashing prefs is futile as reinstalling does not trash the prefs.
And as far as your bad advice about keeping the boot drive as scratch. It may not affect you if you are working on web images, but for any serious user of photoshop a scratch disk must be on a second hard drive otherwise photoshop will slow dramatically.
you really need to learn how to use your software.
The "advice" you gave is bad, awful, mindless and wrong.
The correct advice would be to ALWAYS set your primary scratch disk to a physically separate, dedicated internal hard drive (internal whenever possible), or to an external, dedicated hard drive that you always keep connected when you are using Photoshop.
PEBKAC. It never fails. The more strident the rant, the greater the likelihood of PEBKAC.
I couldn’t have scripted a response that proved my point more perfectly. Thank you, Ramon.
You all are probably right. Still, I can’t trace my problem to anything else. Changing primary scratch disks is the only new element in the equation. And there were no external drives that went offline during that period. It really is puzzling.
While the words NEVER EVER EVER were probably too extreme, I still say, to anyone who gets this error message in the future and needs help, changing primary scratch disks was surely the cause of my 5 hours of grief yesterday. How or why, I can’t say (and when Photoshop won’t boot, you have no chance to change this setting)
The error message again (for Googling purposes): "Could not initialize Photoshop because the disk is not available."
Lessons learned: Trashing prefs didn’t fix the problem Reinstalling Photoshop didn’t fix the problem Repairing permissions and doing everything above didn’t fix the problem Running Disk Warrior and all the above didn’t fix the problem Only completely uninstalling and then reinstalling Photoshop plus restarting and repairing permissions fixed the problem (I can’t say if restarting and repairing permissions were necessary, that’s just what I did)
The next person who gets this error message (instead of Photoshop launching) has a blueprint for getting their system back up so they can finish their project. That, at my last check, is the purpose for this forum.
Kevin the only solution is to trash the prefs. my guess is that you did it wrong (not following the procedure in the FAQs) trashing prefs correctly sets the prefs to factory defaults.
Yes, that’s what I did. Okay, I now understand about the trashing prefs issue.
What I can’t seem to understand is why I always get the aborted boot when I do as you all suggest and set an internal drive other than my boot drive as the primary scratch disk. Can someone please tell me what I’m doing wrong?
In the scratch disk preference, El Diablo is my boot drive.
Yes, that’s my point: every single time I select a scratch disk other than my boot drive, I get this error upon Photoshop startup. It doesn’t matter which drive I select. If it isn’t my boot-up drive, I get this same error message instead of Photoshop booting up.
Let me be clear: I’ve tried selecting every internal drive I have and even a couple of externals. Same result.
Perhaps, I’m not looking like quite the PEBKAC some had suggested. This is actually not behaving as I’m told that it should.
Nice trick with the Shift-Option-Command on startup.
I suspect there may be something wrong with the other drives — connections or format. Check connections; even swap cables. Also, are these other drives formated HFS+ (Mac OS X Extended)?
PEBKAC. It has everything to do with the formatting of the drives.
As Neil and Buko said, your drives need to be formatted as Macintosh HFS+ Extended (Journaled) and NOT case-sensitive. You must also have full ownership read/right permissions to them. If necessary (meaning if the drive still balks due to a permissions error), do a Get Info (Command+I) on the icon of the drive in the Finder and set it to "Ignore ownership of this Volume".
But the formatting of the drive is the first thing to tend to.
I would say that new drives that claim both Mac and Win compatibility are formated as FAT32; a compromise for either platform, but more compromised for ideal Mac usage.
If drive formatting turns out to be the problem (Disk Utility can tell you), you will need to back up everything you need on that drive before reformatting.
The offending drives were formatted as "Extended," but not "Journaled." Even so, ownership appears to have been the culprit. Checking "Ignore Ownership" fixed the issueeven on the drives not formatted as Journaled.
Thanks to all. A concrete solution might well have been worth the derision.
Journaled is not necessary for a scratch drive. You’ll be fine.
Journaling was mentioned just because, as a rule, you want your Macs to be journaled, but if the drive is only used for scratch, then there’s nothing to keep track of.
Obviously, this discussion has strayed into the gray area between Adobe and Apple products.
My immediate problem has long-since been solved, and, as much gosh-darned fun as this thread has been, I’m afraid we’ve come to the end. I’m overcome with melancholythinking of all the fun times we’ve had together. Thanks to all who cheerfully participated.