Can anyone help?

[James Penner]

Hi All,

I'm having trouble with Photoshop CS2's Elliptical Marquee Tool; the other marquee and lasso tools are all acting normally.

For some reason, whenever I choose the Elliptical Marquee Tool it gives me the
"Could not complete your request because the scratch disks are full" message.

I can't see that this message is accurate, as I have lots of space on my hard drive, and I get the same message even if I reboot the computer and try using the Elliptical Marquee on a low-res image.

Does anyone have any idea what's going on? I'd really like to make circular selection again.

Thanks for your time.

- James

[skydog]

What kind of RAM do you have? You could look in your Task Manager to see if you have something else running in the background that is utilizing space. I also found this article using a google search (one of many)

http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/pho...cratchdisk.htm

[Swampy]

Could be your scratch disk is fragmented to the point that Photoshop can't find a contiguous sector(s) big enough to accomodate the temp file? Defrag.

I don't know why this warning would appear with the selection of the elliptical tool though. Does it happen at any other time?

I'm always getting warnings about clipboard failure, but it doesn't seem to affect any operations.

[James Penner]

Hi Skydog,

First off, thanks for the article link. The tip about ensuring your hard drives are well optimized has changed the situation (a little).

I have one hard drive with two 40 Gig partitions, and each has about 20 Gigs free. My default scratch disk was my boot drive, which has 11 per cent fragmentation. I switched the default to my D: drive, which has 4 per cent fragmentation.

I opened up a 400k graphic and tried to use the Elliptical Marquee. Instead of the scratch disk message, a progress bar came up that took about 30 seconds to resolve... but still no selection

As for your other questions, I've got 512 Megs of RAM. A check of my Task Manager doesn't show anything operating in the background that's chewing up my resources.

- James

[skydog]

The ram may or maynot be the problem. Regardless I personally feel 512 is extremely low for Photoshop CS.

Have you tried cleaning your hard drive and storage temps areas. This is a great program if you haven't used it and it's free.

http://www.stevengould.org/software/.../download.html

[Swampy]

I gotta agree with Skydog. 512mb RAM is really pushing the bottom of the envelope with PSCS. I have 2.5gigs and still get the clipboard failure notice after copy/past an entire image.

[mistermonday]

Occasionally PS prefs file gets corrupted and when it does, the program does very strange things. What you are experiencing could well be one of them.
I suggest you reset your prefs by restarting up PS while holding down the Ctrl+Alt+Shift keys all at the same time. You will get a warning window that your prefs are about to be deleted.

CAUTION: Resetting your prefs mans that your Preferences, Color Management settings, and any custom workspaces will be reset to Adobe's factory default settings. If you have heavily customized you settings, presets, etc, you may want to write them down first. If you haven't, then it will only take you a few minutes to set your prefs up again.
Regards, Murray

[James Penner]

Murray: THANK YOU! That must have been what happened, because everything seems to be working perfectly now!

Skydog: Cleanup worked wonders. I was shocked to see I had over 5 Gigs of useless info just taking up space. It's amazing how quickly those temp files collect.

Swampy: Sorry, I didn't mean to ignore you in my last post; I didn't see your reply before I posted.

I know 512 is nothing much for CS2, but I'm not really doing anything too serious. I'm primarily doing minor edits on pics that are 4" x 6" or smaller and they're not more than 300 dpi. That said, I still find myself waiting (sometimes for quite a while) for the program to process some tasks, and I am planning on upgrading as soon as I can afford it.

I really don't mind the wait, as long as it works in the end... and now I can go back to happily making circles.

Thank you all again for your help.

- James