Welcome! You’ve arrived at this page because:
1. You googled Adobe upgrade help and landed here.
2. You are a regular visitor of prepresspilgrim.com.
3. You are a Dementor from the Harry Potter series and you feed off the emotions of souls writhing in frustration and despair.

Anyways, enough of the funny stuff, let’s begin. This post is the product of about 10 man-hours of sitting at a mac and alternately rebooting and trying stuff suggested by the helpful folks at the Adobe Response Center. Among the suggestions we received was:

1. Logging in as root.
2. Reinstalling the latest patches to Tiger (OSX 10.4.11)
3. Rebooting in safe mode.
4. Running the deinstaller as pictured below:

The installer can be downloaded from the Adobe site and is called maccs3clean. Note that some people have used this uninstaller and have had luck with it. Even though it shows only only two levels of uninstall, there are actually FOUR levels. Level number 4 deinstalls every Adobe application that’s ever haunted your hard drive and wipes it clean. Furthermore, like in the movie Alien, a small disgusting creature leaps up from the keyboard and sticks to your face, and shoves an appendage down your throat, looking for any and all things Adobe. Just kidding on the last point.

Note that the script is written in Python. That gives me a warm fuzzy feeling, only really professional developers write in Python.

Did This All Work?
Umm, no. But I just had to tell you guys all about the stuff we tried, because we wasted at least 10 FREAKING hours trying all this stuff to get CS3 activated. That’s the funny part, the application installed just fine but ACTIVATING the license that we PAID for proved to be impossible. And at the end of all this, the response center told us to wipe the hard drive and reinstall the operating system. Of course that means we have to also install Quark, Prinergy, Adobe Acrobat with Pitstop plug-ins, Suitcase and a bunch of other stuff.

So What Did We Do?

Well, we stopped phoning the response center and we found that saved a significant amount of time. Wiping the hard drive clean and spending at least one day reinstalling everything was vetoed by the company owner. Fortunately every workstation in the shop is set up with two volumes. We have one volume as the working volume and the second volume is the new volume. During down times in the shop, we change the startup disk to the “new” volume and starting rebuilding everything from scratch, including the OS. When the prepress operator needs to working on the Mac, we switch back to old volume. Eventually, everything should finally be installed on the “new” volume and the operator can work from that volume 100% of the time.

So basically, my advice to anybody attempting a CS3 upgrade is to split your hard drive into two volumes if possible or add a second hard drive. Even without the CS3 issue it’s good practice as you can clone your install onto the second volume and then copy it to a safe place. Then if you have a problem like a hard drive failure, you can get back up and running in a reasonable amount of time.