Why doesn't Photo Deluxe work after I re-formatted my hard drive?

We've always owned a Mac and with our HP, we're stumped. We recently had to reformat the hard drive and now we have a "Windrive E" with 17 MB of space. It's apparently a partition but now for some reason, Photo Deluxe tries to open in there and we get an error message telling us we're out of disk space. When we open Windrive E, it says there's a Temp Folder in there with 0 Bytes used. How do we get rid of this? Where did it come from? And why is Photo Deluxe using it? We no longer can print from Photo Deluxe because of the disk space error message.

Please help. Windows 98 has us confused!

Any advice or suggestions will be greatly appreciated!

Deborah Fisk

This question was answered on July 14, 1999. Much of the information contained herein may have changed since posting.

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The most likely situation that has occured is that the new partition has pushed you CD-ROM drive from E: to F: Since E: was the CD-ROM letter when you installed the program, it is going back to this letter to access the CD Either remove the small 17MB partition through FDISK or re-install the program so that it knows that CD-ROM drive is now at F:.

We have taken the following information from the support page for Photo Deluxe Some of it we have included to help you better understand how Photo Deluxe works Possibly when you reformatted your hard drive some existing settings for Photo Deluxe were altered, such as the memory preferences as discussed below.

Make sure PhotoDeluxe's scratch disk has enough free contiguous space PhotoDeluxe requires free contiguous hard disk space equivalent to 3 to 5 times the size of the file you edit

1 In PhotoDeluxe, choose File > Preferences > Scratch Disks.

2 Choose a drive from the Primary pop-up menu that has adequate disk space for image editing If no drive has adequate disk space, you'll need to make more disk space available

3 If you have a second hard drive attached to your computer, choose it from the Secondary pop-up menu.

4 Click OK to close the Memory Preferences dialog box, then restart PhotoDeluxe.

C Optimize the drive(s) selected as PhotoDeluxe's Primary and Secondary scratch disks using either the Scandisk and Defrag commands (included with MS-DOS 6.2x and later) or a disk optimization utility (e.g., Norton Utilities) For instructions on using the Scandisk and Defrag commands, refer to your Windows documentation.

During startup, PhotoDeluxe creates a preferences file that stores information about PhotoDeluxe settings If the preferences file becomes damaged, PhotoDeluxe may return an error ***Deleting or renaming the preferences file and then restarting PhotoDeluxe will cause PhotoDeluxe to create a new preferences file that refelects default settings and updated plug-in folder and file information.

You shouldn't use a compressed drive as the scratch disk because the compression program may not always accurately report the amount of available hard drive space Many compression programs calculate available hard drive space based on the average compression ratios applied to existing files on the hard drive Because the amount of compression applied to any given file may vary, it causes the amount of available hard drive space to fluctuate.

Specify a hard drive partition that has at least 3 to 5 times the file size of your image (or at least ten times the size of bitmap mode images) available in free disk space as the primary scratch disk (or for Photoshop 5.0, a third and fourth scratch disk), and then specify a secondary scratch disk if your hard drive has enough free space In Photoshop 4.0.x, do not specify the same hard drive partition for both the primary and secondary scratch disks To specify a scratch disk in Photoshop, choose File > Preferences > Plug-ins & Scratch Disks (Photoshop 4.0.x or later) or choose or File > Preferences > Memory (Photoshop 3.0.x ).

Photoshop uses a scratch disk file (i.e., temporary disk space used for storing data and performing computations) when there is insufficient RAM for image editing Photoshop 4.0.x can have up to two scratch disks, and each can be up to 2 GB Each scratch disk must be on a separate hard drive partition This means if you have 5 GB of free space on an unpartitioned hard drive, and all scratch disks are assigned to it, Photoshop 4.0.x can use up to 2 GB of space in one scratch disk file To use the full 4 GB, partition your hard drives so that there are as many partitions as there are scratch disks you want to use In Photoshop 5.0, you can assign up to four partitions for scratch disk files Although the scratch disk files still have a limit of 2 GB each, Photoshop 5.0 can write as many scratch disks per partition as there is free disk space This means if you have 5 GB of free disk space on an unpartitioned hard drive, and all scratch disks are assigned to it, Photoshop 5.0 can use up to 5 GB of space in three scratch disk files (2 GB, 2 GB, 1 GB).

If you do not have approximately 3 to 5 times the file size of your average file available in free disk space on the drives designated as your scratch disks, you should either change the scratch disk location(s) or free more disk space by deleting temporary files (see solution L in this section) or removing some other files from the drives

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Posted by Ken Colburn of Data Doctors on July 14, 1999

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