After 2 days of agonizing and debugging I finally figured out why Adobe CS2, well, Photoshop, ImageReady, and Illustrator in particular fails to run on my MacBook. The culprit?
Case-sensitivity.
When I installed my new hard drive, I formatted it using the MacOS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled) option. After recently installing CS2, the above 3 apps just refuse to launch. Acrobat Professional works fine after all the updates have been installed. After finally checking out the system log, it appeared that Photoshop was having trouble loading libraries. Luckily it displays the path to the library that it's having problems with so after a bit more digging, I discovered that it was because some of the directory names had different cases. Manually renaming the bad directories to the right case solved that problem but now it's telling me that my user name, organization or serial # is missing or invalid. Which makes no sense since Acrobat works fine. So I'm assuming Photoshop is looking for the file that stores this info in a slightly different case and unfortunately I have no idea what file to look for.
So my only option is to back up everything and reformat, this time without the case-sensitive option. Pain in the @#!$!@#$!!!
Comments (4)
Yeah, when Tiger first came out, I ran into case sensitivity issues right away. Since I didn't really have a need for it, and hadn't installed a whole lotta stuff yet, I just reformatted.
Posted by kaige | August 15, 2006 1:39 PM
Posted on August 15, 2006 13:39
Surprisingly this is the first time I've run into it. I didn't have as much installed on this MacBook either but still it's a pain in the butt.
Posted by Ben | August 15, 2006 1:57 PM
Posted on August 15, 2006 13:57
Since it's an Intel Mac, your partitioning format is GUID. Is creating a new (case-INsensitive) partition (without having to reformat the whole drive) and installing ACS2 there an acceptable alternative?
Posted by kaige | August 15, 2006 2:06 PM
Posted on August 15, 2006 14:06
Hmm... yeah that probably would've worked too. But I generally like to keep software that is installed through an installer on the main partition. Just easier to deal with during an update in case it installs stuff in the Library or Application Support folders. Drag and drop apps I put on my separate app partition.
Posted by Ben | August 15, 2006 2:57 PM
Posted on August 15, 2006 14:57