Photoshop file is causing a disk error message

[jhatter]

I am having problems with a photoshop file. I created it myself and have been working on it from a 1TB external USB drive. the file is 273mb and was fine on the first day I created it.

On the second day, I opened it, did some editting, saved it OK. Then I flattened it and saved this version to my local drive.

I then attempted to open the original from the external drive but got a disk error message. I have tried various ways of opening it with Photoshop but with no success. I have tried to copy it to a different place on my external drive and have tried copying/dragging to my local drive. It starts copying but gets stuck after 104mb. when attempting to copy it I had an -36 error come up.

I have run First Aid on my external drive - no problems occurred.

Is this a lost cause or can someone please suggest another solution?

Thanks in anticipation.

[djr33]

It's very hard to know what happened. It sounds like the file might be corrupt. Could you potentially do something to fix it? I don't know.

A 273mb file is huge and that might be part of the problem. I wouldn't be surprised if Photoshop has trouble sometimes with files that large.

How much work would it be to recreate it? Unless it's a priceless piece of art, it will probably take you less time to remake it than it would to investigate how to restore the file and fix it, even if it is possible (and if it's not, that would be a waste of time).
If you have the flattened version, you can use that as a base to get some of it back or at least know what your goal is. Some careful work and you can probably actually salvage pieces of it.

As for the file itself, is it a problem with the actual OS-level file? If you can't copy the file to another location, that sounds like it's the case. But if you just can't open the file with photoshop, there might be other ways around it. Try another piece of software that can open .psd files. For example, QuickTime player (QT Picture Viewer, that is) can do that, at least in one of the recent versions. I'm not sure if the latest version still does, but it probably can. See if you can get any of your image back that way.

[techno_race]

I also repeatedly get the -36 error (aren't numbers helpful?) in Photoshop on my new 1TB drive. I think we've found a bug.

[jhatter]

Thanks for your replies - I think re-creating the file is the only option at the moment.