After I rebuilt my Mac using the Migration Assistant, everything worked – with the exception of Adobe’s Creative Suite, CS3. Getting CS3 to work turned out to be a much bigger issue than I thought, with many hours spent digging through Adobe’s knowledgebase, their forums and on their phone. The same Migration Assistant issue exists for Adobe CS4 and can also be solved by using the steps outlined below.
In general, the problem is as follows: If you use the MacOSX Migration Assistant to migrate to a new Mac or to rebuild an existing Mac, chances are very high that you will run into the dreaded Adobe Creative Suite “Licensing for this product has stopped” issue. Even if you do not migrate your applications (as I did), the Migration Assistant migrates some of its settings, which renders the Creative Suite product unable to start. To analyze my CS3 problems, I went as far as installing a trial copy of Photoshop CS4, which would not work either. That alerted me to the fact that this was not a licensing issue for a particular CS component, but for all of Adobe’s creative suite products.
There are only two ways how to fix this issue:
- Reinstall your Mac without the use of the Migration Assistant (only to be used as a last resort, if everything else fails)
- Do some open-heart surgery (don’t worry – if it fails, your only alternative would have been a complete reinstall anyway)
Following are step-by-step instructions of how to get Adoce Creative Suite CS3 and CS4 to work again:
- Make sure you have copies of your Adobe products handy, since you will need to reinstall them. Don’t start this without having the disks or files you need for reinstallation.
- You will also need your admin/super-user password.
- Download a copy of the Adobe Flash player, since you will lose Flash in the process. Don’t install it yet.
- Download a copy of the Adobe CS3 clean script (there’s also one for CS4). Run it to uninstall CS3. It will delete the entire CS3 installation plus Flash.
- Uninstall any other Adobe software – better safe than sorry.
- Go to the following folders one at a time and delete anything that starts with “Adobe”, “Macromedia” and “FlexNet” or has it somewhere in its name:
- /Library/Application Support
- /Library/Preferences
- /Applications
- /Applications/Utilities
- ~/Library/Application Support
- Use the finder to search for Adobe, Macromedia or FlexNet. Examine every file or folder – if in doubt throw it away
- Empty your recycling bin, so all the files are gone for sure!
- Reboot.
- Reinstall the Flash Player that you downloaded in Step 3.
- Install CS3 from your install disks. Bingo, it works!
- Install any other Adobe product that you removed.
Done! Now my Mac is fully restored!
After almost three years and two MacOSX upgrades, my MacBook Pro finally came to the point where I needed to do a re-install. Too many installs and uninstalls of programs and all these upgrades had left the Pro unstable with frequent hangs-ups.
Being no stranger to re-installs (e.g., every year my XP systems get re-installed), I expected better than XP and got positively surprised. After doing one backup in addition to my regular Time Machine and Chronosync backups, I formatted the hard drive and did a fresh Snow Leopard install. During the install, I used the Migration Assistant to restore from Time Machine all of my user settings and data except for the program (since I had many that I did not need any longer).
The results were spectacular. After 2 hours, my MacBook Pro was ready, with all the Apple apps installed and all data present. Once click on mail.app and all my mail was back. Ditto with Safari – everything was preserved. I started to re-install one third-party app after another — for every app, it had retained the licensing info and they all worked again from the very first start after finishing the installation. The only exceptions were Adobe’s apps (Photoshop CS3 and Dreamweaver CS3). Despite deactivating the Photoshop license, but not the Dreamweaver license, before erasing the disk, both apps did not run after the re-install. Everything else worked immediately and flawlessly.
Way better than any Windows re-built that I’ve ever done! I’m a happy camper today…
43 cents is what, as ZDnet reports, a Russian network of malware affiliates called “Partnerka” pays to get a Mac infected. The network tries to lure you into downloading malicious video codecs and video players that allow you to play video files that Quicktime cannot play.
Our advice: Download Perian or vlc (my video player of choice) and if neither can play a video file, it’s not worth watching it.
Late last week, I upgraded my MacBook Pro to Snow Leopard. At the last minute, I decided to not swap hard drives and do a clean install. Instead I cleaned out a lot of the stuff on my existing, faster hard drive and did an upgrade. It took around 45 minutes and went without a hitch.
What I like:
- Upgrade went without a hitch. In fact, this is the first time ever that I did two OS upgrades on one piece of hardware.
- Snow Leopard on my 2007 MacBook Pro runs MUCH faster than Leopard. That alone is worth the upgrade.
- I gained around 10 GB of hard drive space. On a 100 GB drive, that’s a lot
- Almost all the apps ran immediately, since I upgraded them before the Snow Leopard upgrade. No problems with any of my photo apps (I don’t use Nikon software). Even MS-Office works fine.
- Even older versions of smaller apps that I rely on, such as Fetch, Speed Download or Visual Hub, are working. I would have to pay for upgrades and would do so, but I’m postponing these paid upgrades for now, since the older versions are working.
- Zero problems with my printers – one of my big fears.
- Zero problems with my backup routines, mainly through Chronosync – another one of my big fears.
- Zero problems with iPhone and iPod synch’ing after the upgrade
- Synch of iCal with Google is now built in.
What I don’t like:
- I’m barely getting used to Gamma 2.2, even after calibrating the MacBook Pro LCD. In fact, Lightroom and Adobe Bridge CS3 look very dark. I need to re-calibrate my notebook, even although there is not that much I can adjust on the LCD. Mid-term, I need to get a second LCD monitor again.
- Widemail is broken – it’s amazing that to this date, mail.app does not support a 3 column layout. Widemail was the solution, until now. The developer is still working on upgrading it. Until then, none of my other Macs get upgraded. Actually, I might switch back to Thunderbird, a much better email program than mail.app anyway.
- In fact, all mail.app plug-ins are broken
- Apple’s accelerated release date surprised many smaller ISVs. I’m working with betas of 1passwd, an app that I cannot live without, and other betas from smaller developers. Cocktail, my automated maintenance program, does not work, so I’m postponing automated clean-ups for a while. Overall, nothing significant, just nuisances. My hat is off, though, to these small developers that are really working hard on catching up with Apple’s move.
- Sleep mode is very sleepy – it often takes more than a minute for my MacBook to go to sleep whereas under Snow Leopard, it was asleep instantaneously.
- Nambu, my Twitter client, is very unstable, but there are work-arounds
Overall, a very good experience so far, even although one mail plug-in keeps me from updating the other machines…
