tech day
- At January 30, 2007
- By ken
- In tech
Today is the day Joe Hall has been (undoubtedly) looking forward to… I’m have Mac issues. Actually I’m having Adobe issues, but the programs happen to be installed on a Mac and therefore I’m having Mac issues. No fear… nothing a complete reinstall of Mac OS X won’t fix. My Adobe aps (inlcuding After Effects 7… not 6.5 which still works great… but 7) just hang up during boot. Very strange. I’ve spent the greater part of the day shuffling and moving files, backing up files, putting files on my other hard drive so they’ll be there when I reinstall. I’m thinking through every single file I have, where it resides, where it should reside. Once we’re done, I’ll have a much more organized machine.
In the meantime, I’ll just shuffle my work to the laptop, which couldn’t have arrived at a better time.
Everything is moved… tomorrow is “reformat day.” Any suggestions before I pull the trigger? Here are the symptoms as I can see them. (oh, I spent 2 hours on Adobe tech support, too).
Photoshop / Illustrator / GoLive / After Effects 7 all exhibit same behavior. They launch, and freeze on the splash screen. After about 5-10 minutes, I get an error message that reads something like “serious error occurred. reinstall Creative Suite 2.” When I launch the CS2 install disk, I can see the installer file. I launch it, and it flashes briefly and then does nothing. The application to reinstall won’t run. I even copied it to the hard drive and tried. At that point, it prompts me for my install password, which I give. Then it stops. Doesn’t do a thing.
The Adobe people seem to think it’s related to “operating system degradation.” (have fun with that, Joe). Something about the admin permissions being corrupt, maybe?
OK, what do you suggest?
And for fun stuff today, here are some links I’ve amassed over the past few days:
For the font nerds out there, help Helvetica beat Arial in this little game.
Spiffy idea… make an invisible bookshelf.
Pixel Surgeon has an interview with Heroes creator.
-joe d.
Ken- My only suggestion would be to upgrade to a PC. Hey no kidding, everybody admits Mac makes great TV commercials.
ps. I’m making your post my new Desktop
Sean Sperte
First thing I do when Adobe’s programs are throwing a fit is rebuild my font cache. If you’re not already, you should be using Font Explorer X. Included among the many features are some font cache utilities.
Secondly, I’d try all the usual OS maintenance scripts and functions.
- Maintenance scripts
- Reset PRAM, NVRAM and power management unit
- Repair permissions
- fsck
Thirdly, try creating a new user on the machine and logging in as that. If the problem still occurs you know it’s system-level and not a problem with your personal home directory. With that information you can safely backup your entire home directory and restore it after the wipe and install.
If, on the other hand, the apps launch without problem, then you know there’s something in your user account that’s corrupted. I’d treat the Application Support and Adobe folders as suspect.
pete
Have you tried the usual stuff… throwing away your preference file and repairing permissions etc? Any chance you have a corrupt font?
Steven Grey
make sure you give yourself plenty of time. And don’t be afraid to do a custom install. You can save a tremendous amount of disk space by not installing certain programs that come bundled with osX. But formating a mac is fun.
Chris S.
Anybody can operate a Mac. Join the big boys and learn Microsoft, you won’t have near the problems.