PhotoshopCS5 crashing with Intuos4

[Smokey2011]

Hi everyone, I just bought a new Intuos4 and it's been a total nightmare ever since.

Previously, I had a Wacom Graphire2 and worked great, Photoshop never crashed.

Now, I'm having some big time issues with CS5 crashing.

Specs:

Intel duo core 3 gig
3 gigs ram
More than 1TB hard drive space
ATI Radeon 4670 with hardware acceleration turned on

Randomly, when I try to save a file, CS% just hangs and does not complete the save. This happens with 'save' and 'save as' at random times. If I try to change the file format (TIFF) for example, same thing happens.

It seems to happen once I've been working on the image for 5 minutes or more. If I save every 1 minute it's successful. But when I start getting into the 500 history states or so, it crashes on save.

For example, if I am working on a file named "Ocean", I will work on it for 5 minutes or so and then select "save" or "save as" (doesn't matter which one).

It then begins to save the file, but under the name "~psAE.tmp" and the file size is about half of what it should be. The file I was working on (Ocean) remains untouched. It just loses anything that I worked on since the last time it did manage to save successfully.

So in other words, selecting "save" doesn't overwrite the file, it creates a new one called ~psAE.tmp but the file is corrupted and useless. The original "ocean" file is fine and untouched. Selecting "save as" does the same.


Anyone have any insight into this odd problem??

 

[Steve]

Have you uninstalled the Intuos4 to see if the problem goes away?

 

[JgraphNet]

>But when I start getting into the 500 history states or so...
Yikes !! Dont tell me you've got that many set in Preferences ...

Not using Intous 4 but CS5 with Inous 3 works great for me up in filesizes of 500 Mb and more and it should be the same driver fo I3 and I4.
Perhaps you should bring this up with Adobe ?
I would.

 

[Smokey2011]

Thanks guys.

I solved the problem.

Ultimately, it was my hard drive that was failing and every time Photoshop wrote to the scratch disk (the hard disk that was bad), it froze.

My Windows XP became worse with each passing day until it just fell to pieces and wouldn't boot. Kind of like pulling out one brick from a wall each day until it finally collapses.

Windows was doing all sorts of crazy things which made me realize that the hard drive was going bad, so I ran a disk check on it and sure enough, it found tons of bad clusters and bad sectors.

So I threw it out, installed a new hard drive and now everything works like a dream, including photoshop and intuos4.



Let this be a major word of advice to everyone: *every* hard drive will eventually fail, so it is imperative that you back up your files frequently before something like this happens. I had all my stuff backed up so I'm ok. But had I not, I would have lost everything, because that hard drive is toast. Probably the 5th hard drive I've had fail on me over the years. There's very little warning- you might have a few days of odd behavior before it just shuts down completely. Backup, backup, backup.

 

[JgraphNet]

Well - who would have thought of that ? Glad you solved it. True it is indeed about HD's. Been crashing lots of them and to add something to this I've found I've had least problems with Seagate drives. Those have just kept going when others have died. Even got them as externals.
And no - I'm not paid to say this. It's my own experience talking.

 

[Smokey2011]

I've used all kinds of drives- Western Digitals, Seagates, Hitachis, Maxtors, Quantums, the list goes on.

Western Digital are the ones that have crashed on me the most. Infact this latest one was a Western Digital 200GB, with the year 2006 written on the label, so it's 5 years old.

I swear these hard drives today are a dime a dozen. To think that we can get 1TB drives for 30 bucks makes me wonder what kind of quality are they building them with? Or are they making them good for 5 years only to crash soon after?

 

[JgraphNet]

>Or are they making them good for 5 years only to crash soon after?

Lol !! Actually - that's the warranty Seagate offers on their drives - 5 years. On the Barracudas anyways. Possibly that's when they hit the DOE..