www.nickhodge.com

Adobe Premiere and Pho­toshop are a crit­ical part of the applic­a­tion set I use daily to pro­duce videos and online con­tent. There­fore, I (actu­ally Microsoft) owns an Adobe Pro­duc­tion Premium to edit and cre­ate all my thegeekstories.com

Some months ago, I installed a beta of Adobe Sound­booth CS3. And a beta of Adobe Premiere Pro CS3. In ret­ro­spect, prob­ably this was the root cause of my headache.

Hav­ing installed my new Pro­duc­tion Premium on my Vista laptop; Setup.exe brings up a notice that Sound­Booth CS3 could not be installed as I had pre­vi­ously used a Beta. OK, using the Adobe sup­plied WinCS3Clean script (writ­ten in Python, BTW), I de-installed everything and attemp­ted to install a fresh.

No go. None of the applic­a­tions that make up the Suite would install. “Com­pon­ents Failed to Install“

Read­ing the installer help sup­port files sug­gests using msconfig.exe to restart without star­tup applic­a­tions; no go. Restart in safe mode (F8 at star­tup) and install. No go. Move the installer DVDs (4x) onto the hard drive and install from this image. No go.

This time, it is my usual prac­tise has been to “blame the OS” (note: even the install notes for Cre­at­ive Suite CS3 on MacOS X runs to 23 indi­vidual points!) . Launch the Setup.exe as Admin­is­trator. No go. Run WinCS3Clean as Admin­is­trator, and use the Win­dows Install Clean Up. No go. Log into the Microsoft net­work just in case there is some weird Group Policy thing on my account. No go. 

Finally, I stumble across this on the Adobe sup­port site: “License has Expired” . Right; my serial num­ber has already been recor­ded and the apps can­not be installed again. Whilst not the exact error I was see­ing, it seemed to be where I was ulti­mately at as the next step.

It worked.

What the? I notice that there are a couple of steps prior to remov­ing this file. Re-installing onto another PC “as a test” and most prob­ably re-installing your whole OS . If I hadn’t removed this cache file, I may have resor­ted to a com­plete OS re-install step.

The prob­lem ulti­mately was Adobe’s dra­conian and flawed install pro­cess. Not the OS. I want my 24 hours of lost pro­ductiv­ity back, please.

If I had rein­stalled the OS, yes the prob­lem would have been fixed. But it’s like open­ing an almond nut with a H2 Hum­mer going at 100. It will surely solve the prob­lem; but lesser force and bet­ter inform­a­tion earlier can open the nut, too. And save lots of time and a bar­rell or two of oil.

Oh, and as a part of my near scorch the earth clean up, I de-installed Acrobat 8 Pro­fes­sional. Hav­ing not used Pro­fes­sional for any­thing apart from read­ing PDFs in the last 6 months, I am not going to re-install it.  Using the .xps format print­ing out stuff I need to keep is great.

How does someone who doesn’t have a day to install soft­ware nav­ig­ate this? How does someone who hasn’t been installing Win­dows and Adobe applic­a­tions for 10+ years get through this?

Down­load the 21Mb update to Par­al­lels (to build 1884)

Boot Win­dows XP to ensure all is OK before I install Vista. Win­dows XP “seems” to boot a little faster. Unable to quantify exactly how much.

Backup exist­ing 15Gb Win­dows XP .hdd, just in case. Cre­ate a new 15Gb image to install Vista into.

Pararl­lels settings:

Install into the fresh 15Gb image, 1024Mb of RAM alloc­ated to image. Vista is marked at (exper­i­mental) as OS. Installing onto a Mac­Book Pro with 2Gb of RAM and MacOS X 10.4.7

• Beta 2 Build 5384 DVD (thanks, Frank Arrigo at Microsoft Australia)
• Star­ted install at 11:05am
• Vista install auto-restarted at 11:35
• Vista install auto-restarted at 11:43am
• Ques­tions (loc­a­tion, time, user­name) at 11:46am
• Vista install auto-restarted at 11:47am
• Into Vista Beta 2 at 11:50am
• Install Par­al­lels Tools from the Par­al­lels VM menu. Note that these don’t seem to be signed drivers, so ignore all the warn­ings and install away
• Manual Vista Restart
• On restart, if the “Wel­come Cen­ter” doesn’t appear, choose it from the Start menu. Click on Add Hardware.
• Vista found net­work card, and auto­mat­ic­ally con­figured net­work. Also note that Vista also finds “PCI Bridge Device” which I asked Vista to ignore
• Restart; Vista found net­work card, and auto­mat­ic­ally con­figured net­work. Note that the Net­work Adaptor set­tings for the Par­al­lels VM set “Bridged” worked OK

In short, it works. Note that I haven’t stress tested this; and the Par­al­lels guys say its exper­i­mental. Beta OS on exper­i­mental hyper­visor vir­tu­al­iz­a­tion. Your mileage may actu­ally turn into inchage quickly.

RC1 Note from 8:20pm

You can­not install Vista RC1 on Par­al­lels. Bug­ger. ISO, DVD burnt or upgrade from Beta 2 to RC1. None of these paths work.

***STOP: 0x000000A5 (0x0001000B, 0×50434146, etc)

“The ACPI Bios in this sys­tem is not fully com­pli­ant to the spe­cific­a­tion. Please read the Readme.txt for pos­sible work­arounds, or con­tact your sys­tem vendor for an updated bios.”

What a few days. My Win­dows XP install on the Dell has been unstable for a few months; and I thought I had man­aged to recover XP enough to have a stable plat­form. Unfor­tu­nately, on Fri­day night it finally exploded. Also two Out­look .pst files went west (thank good­ness for backups!). Com­pletely erased the hard drive, rein­stalled XP, and all the required updates. Some­time between installing these updates and the virus checker, I was infec­ted with a ping-flooding virus. All is cool now. Just recov­er­ing the final pieces now.