Problem writing to the scratch disk error -36 PLEASE HELP!!!

[mattsuzu]

May possibly be hardware but none the less please help me!

Have a g3 B/W tower, clocked at 400mhz, 640mb ram (photoshop set to 80% ram usage) 160gb Western Digital drive, DL DVD Burner, OS 10.4.3

Just recently after a few brush strokes photoshop errors out saying there was an error writing to the scratch disk. (which is the same disk as the OS is on)
P>S what does scratch disk do anyway?

The only way to get over it is to force quit and re-open photoshop, loosing work. Only for it to do it again.

Disk utility tells me my disk needs repair, as:
" Keys out of order
The volume MacHD needs to be repaired.

Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit"

However disk utility does not allow me to repair the disk, unless i need to boot off 10.4 disk and do it that way which i will try now.

Anyway, if this is hardware what should i do, and if its not - any ideas???

Please help, i've just biult this machine from spares and i really want it to work as i've already pretty well given my mum my old PC that i built for Graphic Design... So i'm up S#@*T creek without a paddle if nobody has any ideas. Thankyou for your time.
Matt Dean

[mattsuzu]

Okay, after booting up off my Tiger install dvd heres what i get when trying to repair disk...

Keys out of order
Rebuilding catalogue B-tree
Invalid Key Length
Missing thread record id=92792
Missing thread record id=96967
Invalid extent entry
unable to repair disk.....

Also tried a re-install over th etop, however it errored out. I am about to try another install DVD soon to make sure its not just my disk.
Any ideas yet?

[mattsuzu]

Upon "Preparing the disk" the installer errors out every time.

Looks like its a re-partition/format and install for me... yay

Before i do, what would have caused such an error exactly? The systems only been build a couple of weeks. Since then i did have some RAM caused Kernal panics which caused some nasty lockups, related you think? I've found the bad stick and thrown it long ago and the system has been working great ever since. The only other thing that doesn't work properly is microsoft RDC will not open nomatter how many times i've re-installed it...

So yeah, in short before i've gotta do all this will it fix the problem, what could have caused the problem, and how do i stop it from happening again...

Thanks for your help, i'm really looking forward to a reply!

[Tommo]

Wow, a lot of info. To answer some of your questions in order. -36 is Apple's error code for an I/O error which can be caused by a number of things, to many to list here. Photoshop's scratch space is the area of the disk it uses for temporary file storage which among other things it uses for the History panel where it stores copies of the image in its stages of deverlopment.

From what you have said the problem is definitely with your disk. First question that springs to mind is how much free space did you have ? Also I am assuming it is partioned with just one partition, and if you look under Photoshop> Preferences>Plugins and Scratch Disk you can see where it is trying to use.

Have you tried repairing permissions, this could be a cause ? Otherwise you could be looking at a hardware issue. Others here maybe able to clear that up better than I can, but a 160GB disk seems very big to be in an old B/W G3, as far as I can remember their standard disk size when new would have been no more than 10B, and this maybe the cause of your problem .

[mattsuzu]

Yeah. Only using 8gb so far out of 160 - as i said the systems pretty well freshly installed. Even though the b/w didn't have such a large disk one would think using 10.4.3 would basically overcome that issue?

The disk would not repair from disk utility last night off the CD - in which i just got over it and re-partitioned it. OS would not install though still (possibly defective hard drive i'm thinking)

So for a bit of an excersize - i have the 160gb in my PC formatting thouroughly in NTFS format, to which when its finish i'll try some read/write tests and possibly scan it. After that i'll whack it back into the Mac and see how we go with that.

As for alot of info, i work as a PC service Tech. and i'm just branching over to Macs aswell (love them, prefer over any pc) so i know what its like trying to help somebody who gives you no - or incorrect info!!!