Wee Photoshop problem that someone might know how to fix. Specs first…
Phsop 9 (CS2 suite) on OSX10.4.11, G5 1.6
Pshop programme launches, but drag-n-drop of file to dock icon or open file command sends it into nosedive with spinning beachball of death and ‘Application Not Responding’.
I’ve tried ditching the Photoshop.plist and relaunching but to no avail.
If I launch Pshop and create a new file, everything seems to work…colour palettes, image sizer, all the usual stuff. I just can’t open any existing image files!
Repair permissions, boot from an install DVD and repair the disk using
Disk Utility. Pay careful attention to the output from the repair
permissions step. If there are a lot of “fixes”, run it again and
again until you only ever see the same (hopefully shorter) list. Same
goes for repair disk (when booted from the DVD). The first repair gets
rid of the first line of errors, which then exposes further errors to
view.
Walter
On Sep 1, 2010, at 6:22 AM, hugh wrote:
Pshop programme launches, but drag-n-drop of file to dock icon or
open file command sends it into nosedive with spinning beachball of
death and ‘Application Not Responding’.
Photoshop makes heavy use of the disk for it’s virtual memory system. Mac OS has an automatic disk optimization system that periodically moves files around on disk to place the large, frequently-accessed files in the outermost (fastest) tracks of the physical disk. If your drive is very full, this process may take longer or not work at all. In any case, it doesn’t run continuously, but it’s part of the housekeeping your Mac does every night at 1am. I’m just guessing that something along those lines cleaned up your disk. But just to be safe, today is an excellent day for a bootable backup. SuperDuper is highly regarded for this, along with one of those $99 terabyte drives they’re putting in cereal boxes these days.
I don’t think we have the same cereal boxes over here, Walter…
Thanks for the explanation. My Mac is switched off at 1am, so not sure when it does its housekeeping…it’s very discreet about it, not like my cleaning lady.
A bootable backup, yes. I use Carbon-Copy but haven’t done one in a while, now is the time!
Photoshop makes heavy use of the disk for it’s virtual memory system. Mac OS has an automatic disk optimization system that periodically moves files around on disk to place the large, frequently-accessed files in the outermost (fastest) tracks of the physical disk. If your drive is very full, this process may take longer or not work at all. In any case, it doesn’t run continuously, but it’s part of the housekeeping your Mac does every night at 1am. I’m just guessing that something along those lines cleaned up your disk. But just to be safe, today is an excellent day for a bootable backup. SuperDuper is highly regarded for this, along with one of those $99 terabyte drives they’re putting in cereal boxes these days.
Walter
I would bet Walt is right here. Pshop eats hard drives for lunch, breakfast, dinner and between meal snacks so the more free disk space you have available, the better. Even better is to have a separate hard drive that Pshop can use as it’s cache.
It’s in the general preferences for Pshop. Under the Pshop menu under Preferences then under Plug-Ins & Scratch Disks. The section labeled as Scratch Disks is where you would set this. You can have up to four separate scratch disks.
Photoshop manages its caches pretty well. It will only retain that
data if Photoshop crashes mid-way through an operation. That can eat
gigs and gigs of your disk and you’ll never find it. You can
periodically erase this disk (have Disk Utility write it full of
zeroes) to get optimum performance, which will degrade over time.
Walter
On Sep 8, 2010, at 1:04 PM, hugh wrote:
That’s interesting. and can you periodically clean out your scratch
disks?..does Pshop sort of cache things there permanently?..or just
temporarily?
I’ve got a couple of these and they’re great; don’t even get warm.
Thanks for the explanation. My Mac is switched off at 1am, so not sure when it does its housekeeping…it’s very discreet about it, not like my cleaning lady.
If it doesn’t do it in the early hours, it doesn’t do it. It’s important that it does do it though, so I’d suggest Cocktail or Onyx to run those tasks when you want to do it, ie, in the daytime sometime. Very important, and I seem to remember you wrote in in the past regarding system problems Hugh …
A bootable backup, yes. I use Carbon-Copy but haven’t done one in a while, now is the time!
Every night is the time! Seriously, a nightly backup is so simple to set up, and you can just forget about it then, and rest easy. I’m assuming Carbon Copy Cloner can do that; if not, SuperDuper certainly can.
Hugh, I can’t stress enough how important ALL of this is.
Crikey, Paul, you’re scarey sometimes… Anyway yes, I must do as you say! And I’m sure it’s very good sense. Only I am NOT going to go around buying a new disk and other equipment (jeez, I’ve got enough flipping boxes and wires as it is) just for Pshop. I’ll buy a disk for all my needs, but never for one programme. Sorry!
ps. that offer was at amazon? I was expecting it to be on the back of my cereal packet (Cornflakes at the moment)
