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…
The MacHeist bundle has often been controversial and the free MacHeist nano bundle (5+1 apps for free for 4 more days) isn’t different, either. Upset by the nano-bundle, a coalition of Mac developers, organized by Daniel Jerkut, the developer of MarsEdit, now offers its own discounts: While the MacHeist nano bundle is alive, they offer the “One Finger Discount” (no, they do not specify which finger) – 20% off of all software from all participating Mac developers.
Simply go to OneFingerDiscount.com to see a list of participating developers – so far, 75 and growing. All of them have links to their stores, where you can enter the coupon code “One Finger Discount” to get 20%. So check them out and if you need to stock up on Mac software, this is your opportunity.
Among the participating developers are Red Sweater Software, Smile on my Mac and Tiny Planet Software.
After the Macfriendly bundle was released (and did not really sell well), MacHeist is next. This time with a free bundle of 5+1 apps. Since it’s free, there is no reason for you to not get it, so grab it now.
My quick take on the bundle:
- If you are a Twitterer, getting Twitterific for free alone warrants your trip to the MacHeist site.
- If you get distracted by all your windows on your Mac while writing your latest novel, give WriteRoom a try – it takes over your entire screen, thus allowing you to really focus on your writings.
- TinyGrab is a screen capturing utility with a twist – you can upload your screenshots straight to your own FTP server and use the provided URLs to tell people where to find them. I will probably not use it, since I have enough screen grabbing software already.
- If you are in need of organizing all the tiny bits of info, ShoveBox is a great app for that. I would use it, but I already use YoJimbo for exactly that purpose.
- Hordes of Orcs is a good take on tower defense games.
- Still locked, the most desirable app is MarinerWrite, a full fledged text editor. This one I will definitely install, should it get unlocked.
The value of this bundle cannot be beat, so head on over to MacHeist and download it now.
