PSCS activation and a new hard drive

HL
Posted By
hanford_lemoore
Nov 26, 2003
Views
343
Replies
6
Status
Closed
Hi all,

I’m sharing a story here about my adventures with a failing hard drive. Just thought people would like to know:

I installed Photoshop CS on a drive that is *NOT* my boot drive, it is a secondary drive (Drive F).

Shortly after installing and activating PSCS, the drive started acting up. I thought it might be PSCS but I eventually discredited that theroy. It’s just the drive is going bad. When accessing the drive, the OS would lock up at random times.

I pulled out the old drive and installed a new drive of a totally different make, model, capacity, and file system. My OS boot drive (C:\) is the same.

I installed the PSCS upgrade on the secondary drive. Luckily for me, my Photoshop 7 install was, and still is, on my C: drive, so the upgrade went by fine. I had to re-enter my PSCS serial number during the install.

During install, I was not asked to activate, and Activate is not selectable in the PSCS menu.

So, my experience was: I completely switched out the drive that PSCS was installed ans activated on, and did not run into an Activation issues what so ever.

Interesting side note: for a lot of my applications that were installed on my failing drive (Drive F), I simply copied their foldrs from Drive F to the book drive (Drive C). I then removed drive F and installed the new drive, and copied the apps back over from C to the new F, in their old location. This worked like a charm … no need to even reinstall these apps. I didn’t want to try this with PSCS though, due to Activation conserns. But in hindsight I think it would have worked.

~Hanford

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JD
Jeff_Darken
Nov 26, 2003
But doesn’t PSCS stores its activation info on drive C which was not changed? Therefore no need to re-activate.

Jeff
HL
hanford_lemoore
Nov 26, 2003
Jeff,

Well, I guess so. But it also builds a profile of your system into the activation, and the rumors had been that when your system changes radically, you need to reactivate. I thought for sure switching out the make and model of the drive that PSCS was installed on was going to for a reactivation.

~Hanford
JD
Jeff_Darken
Nov 26, 2003
Hanford,

Here is an interesting thought. Suppose you had changed drive C but not the disk on which PSCS is installed?

Jeff
MM
Mick_Murphy
Nov 26, 2003
I don’t think reactivation in itself is a problem. It’s the thought of having to reactivate and it not working and then having to go through the telephone experience. I’ve had to do this a few times with Microsoft and it’s been relatively painless but it always generates a bit of anxiety wondering whether I’m going to get hassled for doing something perfectly legal. I don’t know how easy this is with Adobe and I don’t really want to have to find out because it is annoying.

As far as CS is concerned, it has different sensitivites to Windows and Office XP. I’ve swapped out more or less everything but the hard drive and processor trying to solve a hardware problem since I first installed CS and it never asked for reactivation (nor did Microsoft strangely enough as I must have been way over the 7 points). However, CS did want immediate reactivation when I ran the System File Checker utility (sfc command) because the system had become unstable with all the crashes I’d had. This went through without any problems. I also reinstalled XP on a different partition (had to phone Microsoft) and reinstalled CS. It required reactivation but again no hassle.

The biggest problem would be if it suddenly required reactivation and there was no phone or internet connection – a scenario that is very feasible for photographers travelling with a laptop and digital camera. I’m not ditching PS6 just in case.
DP
Daryl_Pritchard
Nov 27, 2003
Mick,

Your latter scenario is one that has been discussed in the forum when another PS user encountered that very situation. Scott Byer of Adobe acknowledged that perhaps such scenarios weren’t given as much consideration as may be appropriate, and that perhaps Adobe can investigate a way to accommodate them. My suggestion was that perhaps a dot release could at least modify activation so that it always permits at least a 2-3 day use of Photoshop, for every uninstall/reinstall of the application. While that would still require packing along your Photoshop CD or copying it to a hard drive, at least it would give an alternative when there is no phone or internet connection available for immediate activation.

Apart from this, there are two other alternatives: Use of an activation crack (which I feel is fully warranted by a user who isn’t attempting to thwart the intent of the EULA) or reinstalling PS CS to a low-level-formatted drive to which a drive image has been restored. For the latter approach to work, the drive image would have to have been made prior to installing PS CS, so that it is also free of any activation records. This is a very unwieldy solution but is does work…I’ve done it during my recent course of rebuilding my system software installation to troubleshoot PS CS problems.

Actually, I’d say the best idea really is what you suggested…keeping a working installation of an earlier version of PS on your laptop when travelling, if your hard drive space can afford it. I can’t imagine anyone who’d have to have the new capabilities of PS CS while "in the outback".

Regards,

Daryl
SB
Scott_Byer
Dec 1, 2003
And I just want to re-iterate how seriously we are taking this scenario.

-Scott

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