R De Marigny Posted June 11, 2023 Share Posted June 11, 2023 Hi All, Experiencing ongoing issues with my laptop hard drive no space despite only notepad and lightroom being left on it. It has proved to be a nightmare trying to process images without no room on scratch disk and abysmal freeze up. I culled everything I could with the expectation it would free up space, still no joy. I checked disk management noticing two partitions one has 260 MB space , second 956 MB, however if then try to access run as admin - chkdsk E : /f /r /x pressed enter it returns cannot open volume for direct access. Does anyone on the forum have any tech advice , other than to throw the dinosaur in the bin 🫢 as I would prefer to avoid purchasing a new laptop at this moment in time. Anyone have any helpful suggestions? 😟 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Inchiquin Posted June 11, 2023 Share Posted June 11, 2023 (edited) You won't get far on 956 MB. That's about enough space for seven 21MP TIFFs. I'm afraid from what you say it does sound like dinosaur-chucking time Alan Edited June 11, 2023 by Inchiquin 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Harry Harrison Posted June 11, 2023 Share Posted June 11, 2023 3 hours ago, R De Marigny said: I checked disk management noticing two partitions one has 260 MB space , second 956 MB Typo? GB surely. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
R De Marigny Posted June 11, 2023 Author Share Posted June 11, 2023 it does say MB not GB. Thanks for your input both there is nothing left on hard drive after deleting en masse as last ditch effort to free up space, so it does seem like it must have had it. Any buying recommendations for a good laptop anyone? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MDM Posted June 11, 2023 Share Posted June 11, 2023 (edited) Presumably you have all your images on a separate drive(s) backed up. If not do so immediately. You are on a cliff edge. Do you have Lightroom set to do automatic backups? If so and it is set to keep 100% previews or the like then you could gradually fill up a drive without realising it. There was a similar post a little while ago. However, the fact that you are filling up two partitions might argue against that. Perhaps it is some nasty malware or virus? In any case, you are in danger of the disk dying, so my advice would be to wipe it completely and reinstall everything if you want to keep it, making sure you have backed up your basic Lightroom catalog files (these are very small). You can save your settings and presets as well if you want. 32 minutes ago, R De Marigny said: it does say MB not GB. Thanks for your input both there is nothing left on hard drive after deleting en masse as last ditch effort to free up space, so it does seem like it must have had it. Any buying recommendations for a good laptop anyone? How long is a piece of string or in other words how much can you afford to spend? And consider getting a Mac (that I can advise about). Edited June 11, 2023 by MDM 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spacecadet Posted June 11, 2023 Share Posted June 11, 2023 We don't know your drive capacity, but for a start how many images are on it? My LR 1:1 previews are about 4MB each. They're in the previews.lrdata folder in the same folder as the catalogue. You can safely delete them at the expense of slowing down your work a bit as they will have to be remade if LR needs them. But unless you have many tens of thousands of images or a small drive it's probably only going to be a stopgap. I have my older images on a separate catalogue on an external drive. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
IKuzmin Posted June 11, 2023 Share Posted June 11, 2023 (edited) You did not provide any specs of your laptop, neither OS. If it is still potentially workable, after backing up my data, I would try to return to the factory defaults. If this option is unavailable, do clean installation of OS erasing the drive. That helped me to keep one aged laptop at least for travel purposes (screen/delete images on the go). As for recs on a new one, there was a recent discussion: Edited June 11, 2023 by IKuzmin 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rebecca Ore Posted June 11, 2023 Share Posted June 11, 2023 Dying hard drive? It's cheaper to replace that than to get a whole new laptop. If you have a utility for disc diagnostics, use that. Back up everything. Also, if you can create a bootable external drive, do that. The other possibility is malware. The cure for that is reformating and reinstalling. If the original drive is older, probably installing a new drive would be a way to deal with either problem. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
R De Marigny Posted June 11, 2023 Author Share Posted June 11, 2023 Hi All Thanks for your replies. The laptop is not high spec, 64bit x 64 OS windows 11, Intel(R) Pentium(R) CPU 6405U @ 2.40GHz 2.40 GHz, installed Ram 4GB . I back up to up to my three portable plug in hard drives so images are saved there there is ample room as these are 2TB each . Since this problem I did start transferring raw images from camera to portable hard drives then cherry picking a few at a time to process and edit hoping to find a solution. However this is invariably slow time consuming it has caused a significant backlog in my workflow its not an effective working process so I will have to purchase a new replacement with more clout and robust processor. My first thought was a virus or malware as it seemed no matter what files were culled space appeared to be shrinking it freed up little in comparison. I did not have these problems on my pc but I have that in storage elsewhere plus pc cannot be carted around portability is essential for me. I will need to think about options as at present I have a serious backlog of image files to process. Thanks for your help everyone. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
IKuzmin Posted June 11, 2023 Share Posted June 11, 2023 39 minutes ago, R De Marigny said: The laptop is not high spec, 64bit x 64 OS windows 11, Intel(R) Pentium(R) CPU 6405U @ 2.40GHz 2.40 GHz, installed Ram 4GB . x64 Windows 11 on 4GB RAM? Well... I do not consider this machine workable, not mention the use of any recent of Adobe software and image processing tasks. I do not think you should bother with a factory reset or fresh OS installation, even if it would be some Windows 8.1. Just let it go... IMHO 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sooth Posted June 12, 2023 Share Posted June 12, 2023 (edited) . Edited August 9, 2023 by sooth Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rebecca Ore Posted June 12, 2023 Share Posted June 12, 2023 My current laptop has 16 GB memory and 4 GB graphic memory on a card. I have read that bringing this particular machine up to 32 GB wouldn't be worth it. I think you need more memory for the Adobe programs (see their website for minimum and recommended specifications). The issue with your hard drive seems to be separate. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spacecadet Posted June 12, 2023 Share Posted June 12, 2023 (edited) 7 minutes ago, Rebecca Ore said: My current laptop has 16 GB memory and 4 GB graphic memory on a card. I missed that. Mine has 6GB (8GB maximum) and it can be sluggish, and that's with an old version (LR5.7). This may be slowing you down more than the HDD. Edited June 12, 2023 by spacecadet Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rebecca Ore Posted June 13, 2023 Share Posted June 13, 2023 9 hours ago, spacecadet said: I missed that. Mine has 6GB (8GB maximum) and it can be sluggish, and that's with an old version (LR5.7). This may be slowing you down more than the HDD. Mine came with 8 GB memory and I upgraded. The other bottleneck for me was a slow but large (2 TB) hard drive. I added a 500 GB SSD card and that improved things a lot. My Dell is a 2018 purchase (in case things had gotten worse in Nicaragua). Adequate but not particularly fast, but better than my even older iMac. Any older machine can have a slowly failing hard drive, too. SSDs are faster if the machine can take SSD cards internally or has newest ports for USB or Thunderbolt drives. A good graphics card is helpful for the more recent Adobe programs. My graphics card no longer get firmware upgrades. I think with any older machine, time comes to sell it on to someone who needs an email/homework/web browsing machine, and get a new machine if at all possible, but if the hard drive is dodgy, probably best to install a new one and move the OS and programs and user files to that. Macrium Reflect works to do that for Windows. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Inchiquin Posted June 13, 2023 Share Posted June 13, 2023 3 hours ago, Rebecca Ore said: I think with any older machine, time comes to sell it on to someone who needs an email/homework/web browsing machine, and get a new machine if at all possible, but if the hard drive is dodgy, probably best to install a new one and move the OS and programs and user files to that. My work is mostly on desktop machines (only use a laptop occasionally when out of the house) but I always have two computers - a faithful dinosaur that does the email/browsing etc etc and accumulates all the detritus of everyday life, and one high-spec dedicated to creative use - photography, music production, video etc. Alan 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spacecadet Posted June 13, 2023 Share Posted June 13, 2023 (edited) My faithful dinosaur ( a 2014 hand-me-down, vintage 2009) is still doing most of the things it still can. On Windows 7. Even WhatsApp indoors, because it's easier to type than poke away at a little screen. I put up with slow. Edited June 13, 2023 by spacecadet Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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