OT: Photoshop CS4 opens with error "Could not open a scratch file because you do not have the necessary access privileges"

[acdesigntech]

Immediately after that you get "Could not initialize Photoshop because you do not have the necessary access privileges." Then Photoshop quits.

The only way I've found to get around this is by deleting the user profile and recreating it. That seems to fix the problem. I did this yesterday for a user, but today the problem has occurred again. Uninstalling and reinstall CS4 does not help, neither does repairing permissions.

What I do is move the user data to another partition, delete the account, then have them log back in, and move everything back over except the contents of their library folder. I do move back their ~/Library/AppSupport/Firefox and ~/Library/Safari folders though. After this Photoshop works a charm. So it's something in the library, but the usual culprits (preferences, app support, caches) don't seem to be causing it.

Has anyone seen this before? What is the resolution, if any?

[stevewood · Accepted solution]

I've seen this when I have the user folder sitting on another partition. The fix has been to startup Photoshop holding the Command and Option keys to get the Scratch Disk Preference window. Once I had that window up, I believe I set the first scratch disk to Macintosh HD instead of "Startup".

After doing that, I haven't had a problem on those machines.

[acdesigntech]

interesting. i DO have the user folder on another partition. I'll have to try this. Also interesting how this problem had NEVER OCCURRED before the last round of adobe updates to CS4. The updates were all for Acrobat, but maybe it munged with the scratch disk settings for Photoshop?

I'll keep you posted.

[tkimpton]

No problem. One thing I do different is have the /Users and scratch disk on separate disks.

/Users on separate disk than the operating system is you don't have to mess about or wait for users to back k their crap :) this is using fstab

I snapshot using composer for Photoshop and Illustrator when I set their scratch disk to another volume. I then package his and put it in the User Template.

If the user is an w using user then at login I simply copy it to the users profile.

Also at startup policy every time I make sure I run a script duskutil disableOwnership on the scratch disk so there would be any permissions issues.

Hope that helps

[acdesigntech]

I had honestly forgotten about the scratch disk setting on Photoshop - a consequence of being too far from the front lines for too long I suppose. On the two users that were experiencing this issue, I did the scratch disk trick of command-option when opening Photoshop and, no more permissions problem when opening!

Let's see if this sticks tomorrow. Hopefully A really simple fix for yet another stupid adobe problem.

[acdesigntech]

so far so good. The setting seems to be sticking, so I'll keep my fingers crossed :)

[dgraham125]

I've seen this happen with iMovie too. If the user has an AFP share mounted, or launches the file from an AFP share, then this will cause scratch issues to occur.