PS7 and Scratch Disks

Hi,

Can anyone help make this a bit clearer? Lately while using PS7 i get the message when i first open it "scratch disks are full" with a box asking me to chose another drive. I read up on scratch disks in the PS7 help file. The best i can understand it is that it is memory that PS uses and it suggested I defrag the hardrive. I still have 87% free on my hardrive. Also when i "analized" before running disk defrag it said it wasn't needed, and i just defragged last week. I did a "disk cleanup" utility run and that solved the problem but...I keep getting this scratch disk message almost every other day, and this wasn't happening before. Does anyone know a way to handle this? Is there a way to clean out the scratch disks directly?

Thanks

Back up your hard drive immediately. It's probably nothing, but be safe. Often when programs start reporting disk errors, doom is around the corner. All drives go to heaven, you know.

Anyway, I don't know the exact cause of your problem, but what I do know is PS doesn't like its scratch disk to be on the same drive as your OS. You may want to consider getting a second hard drive or adding a partition to your existing one. Re-installing PS might not be a bad idea either.

That's about all I can tell you. Hopefully someone more knowledgeable than I am on this subject will reply. Good luck.

Lyric, I have once gotten that message when my scratch disk was set to the same physical drive that PS was installed to. Thus, if Photoshop is installed on the C drive, you should not set C as one of your scratch disks.
Changre scratch disk settings in Photoshop under: Edit> Preferences> Plugins and Scratch disks.

I had this problem once.
Do a drive search for .tmp files and DELETE them.
Then config your scratch disks for whereever you have the most space.

It happened to me when I was hacking a billboard-sized photoshop image on a computer that was meant for posters.

Thanks for the input everyone. Yes i notice this happens when i have a lot of temp. internet files that show up when i run the disk cleanup utility. After running that I don't get the message again for another day or so. Also, I recently downloaded and installed some custom shapes/brushes that i found (freebies) . I read on the Adobe website that sometimes custom brushes etc. can conflict with photoshop for some reason. So maybe its a combination of things but i think I will try reinstalling photoshop.
Thanks again

If you're having this problem frequently and only have on physical disk in your computer you might want to think about adding a second drive. They're dirt cheap these days and PS performs much better when the scratch disk is set to a different drive than C.