1 December, 2005
Photoshop CS2 Mac Causes Disk Errors
I’ve seen some mention in forums recently about disk problems caused simply by installing Photoshop CS2 on a Mac running OS X. It seems that the installer somehow creates some files with illegal names, and the volume header for your disk becomes corrupted.
Apple’s Disk Utility can’t repair these files or the volume header, and some users are reporting that “the damage sooner or later escalates into profound stability and operational issues that cannot be fixed”, requiring a complete reinstall of your OS and applications. I can’t confirm if it really is that drastic, though.
Some inquisitive souls on the Macintoshian Achaia forum, MacFixIt, Radmind and Macintouch did some digging around, and discovered that the illegally named files were the Vietnamese translation of the legal files. Deleting these (in the Applications -> Adobe Photoshop CS2 -> Legal folder) removed the illegal filename warnings, and allowed the volume header to be repaired (after booting from an alternate start-up disk, of course).
If you’re not sure which of the Legal files is the Vietnamese one, just delete all the ones with character sets you don’t recognise. You should also delete the unnecessary files from the Applications -> Adobe Illustrator CS2 -> Legal folder if you own Illustrator, as they apparently have the same problem. These files are not necessary when using the software.
I haven’t seen any official Adobe fix - if you know of one, please post it in the comments below so I can link it up.
Filed under: Software
3 Responses to “Photoshop CS2 Mac Causes Disk Errors”
December 5th, 2005 at 11:10 pm
Thanks man! I checked Disk Utility, and I had those problems. Booted from my backup disk and deleted the files and repaired the disk, and it’s all good now. Maybe that explains some of the weird problems I’ve been having lately.
December 5th, 2005 at 11:12 pm
I’m the original poster of the Illegal Filename and Volume Header bugs to Macintouch.
Adobe called me today and said, “mea culpa.”
They confirmed the immediate solution to that bug is to delete the files, which can be found in Applications -> Adobe Photoshop CS2 -> Legal folder. (It’s also in the Illustrator CS2 legal folder, too.)
They have not confirmed a fix or resolution of any kind for the Volume Header bug, which may or may not be a separate issue, but is caused by the CS2 installer (Photoshop/Illustrator components) and which remains even if you delete the two Vietnamese EULAs.
The bit about “the damage sooner or later escalates into profound stability and operational issues that cannot be fixed” is based not only on anecdotal evidence from my own experiences at customer sites here in Minneapolis but also from the comments and anecdotes from my Apple Consultants Network colleagues around the country, who also had similar experiences where brand-new G5s running Tiger went south subsequent to CS2 installs.
-Brian (brian@escapecorp.com)
December 5th, 2005 at 11:38 pm
Brian, thanks for posting. It’s good to know that Adobe is at least acknowledging the problem, and hopefully they’ll come up with a fix for it soon.
It’s a bit strange that OS X would allow the CS2 installer to create files with illegal characters - you’d think the OS would prevent that. Apple should probably look into fixing that bug, too.