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An UNVERIFIED Warning about CS3 and CS4

Fred Weiss

Fred Weiss

Merchant Member
For what it's worth from another forum I visit that was posted by a normally reliable member:

DO not ISO/clone your harddrive for backups/restores if you are running Adobe CS3 or CS4 programs!!!

Adobe, in their effort to prevent piracy, added a neat little "preventative" program to CS3 and CS4 which installs hidden in your system. If you try to create a disk image/ISO/clone of your hardrive, this program will corrupt your entire system. Adobe gave no warnings of this, will not take any responsibility for it, and they will not help you at all. Adobe will only say "sorry.....nothing we can do.....you are going to have to re-install everything.....". Un-frick'n-believable.....placing something like this on one of the primary means by which to backup and restore your system.....Adobe has officially lost their minds, IMO.....
question.gif


If you have CS3 and CS4 programs istalled.....you are using programs like Acronis True Image, Power ISO, Magic ISO Maker, etc.....and your system has been going haywire.....then Adobe's little "un-thought-out" hidden addition to CS3 and CS4 is the most likely cause of your problems.....

You have to go back to CS2 in order to avoid it.....
Click to expand...
 
GAC05

GAC05

Quit buggin' me
Might not be true - at least for Illy CS3
I used the Segate OEM version of Acronis True Image to clone my hard drive to a backup hard drive - been doing it for a few months now -
Both drives boot and seem to work ok.
I'm on WinXPpro.

wayne k
guam usa

By the way the seagate oem version seems to be the full blown True Image - free from the seagate support site. Works as long as you have one seagate or maxtor drive in you system. You can even pop in an old out of date drive as a temp slave, as long as it is one of the brands the app is looking for.
whk
 
Replicator

Replicator

New Member
If true, that is unfrikken believable . . . For those of us running legit software and in my case a raid drive that gets mirrored constantly . . . WTF?
 
jiarby

jiarby

New Member
Ghost does a block by block image of a drive... hard to believe that some software is going to make a difference if the copy is at the block level. sounds like a hoax.
 
TheSnowman

TheSnowman

New Member
Wow...that would have been rough. I'm on CS2, and I know I had trouble w/ that because I had a RAID setup that was a mirror. They were able to work me through that.
 
Techman

Techman

New Member
CS3 does add in services that run behind teh scenes. A pain .

CS4 adds in more than a few services in constant contact with some server.. and many are finding they have to set their host file to BLOCK ADOBE so they can run their machine at a decent speed.

Sheesh...
 
Letterbox Mike

Letterbox Mike

New Member
I can't believe a company of Adobe's size would be so stupid that they would sell a product thwt would do this, they must know ALOT of their users are either running mirrored drives or would occasionallly or regularly back up their drives. But i do blieve it, they're getting more and more paranoid of piracy. I understand why, but there has to be a balance between stable software and reasonable anti-piracy measures. If this is true, they dropped the ball big time and it should come back to haunt them. It's on par with Avery's slip-up if it's true...

And as far as CS4 running slow, I'll attest to that. I just upgraded and it is VERY NOTICABLY slower than CS3. I'm overall unhappy with it, it has a few new features that are nice, but overall it's a step backwards in my oppinion.

Techman, any more info on the block adobe comment above? If there's a tweak to be made to speed it up I'm all ears.
 
Techman

Techman

New Member
if you know how to write code to your host file it will be easy,,

If you know not,, then google host file.. its still easy.. All too many software are sending signals out to some servers tracking your usages and sending back to you span ads in your web browsers.. Has nothing to do with unauthorized usage of software. HAs every thing to do with tracking usages. These sneaky little maggots are using up our machine cpu cycles thus slowing our stuff.

Also many of us may consider using foxit reader instead of a regular PDF.. some are installing/using Remote Approach software that tracks your opening of PDF's.. (reader)
 
Ken

Ken

New Member
Adobe Reader 8 is always trying to get me to go to their site..any time I open a .pdf
My AVG 8 allows me to block that.
Annoying...yes.
Ken
 
AKWD

AKWD

New Member
I doubt it is true. There'd likely be legal implications of such an act on your system, whether or not their 'ToS/EULA' states so. In all honesty, it really does not make a lick of sense anyways -- It would make no sense to 'protect' the entire drive from copying; As been proven, there is easier ways around it anyways than to mirror an entire drive.

if this were true, while the app might prevent 'running' from the reinstalled image, so long as you just mount the image to recover instead of doing a full reinstall (Which if you're recovering, does make more sense anyways).

I would strongly believe that it would NOT work, and if it did, I'm sure the first class-action lawsuit for the intentional malicious destruction of private property would come up with Adobe 'remembering' how to fix it. No matter how well-written the EULA would be, the intentional unauthorized destruction of data would likely get a hefty sum in a court. As I said though; Adobe has bigger fish to fry than those just copying their own image of their drive.

I bet though it'd be quick and easy to test; Anyone running a VM? Install CS3/4 onto it, shut down, copy the image and boot to that image. It's the same thing, but you're running from the image.
 
Techman

Techman

New Member
well.. there may be something other than this problem
If you change anything in your machine,, Anything,, adobe will require you to re validate.

I can tell you this is one real problem for techies like myself who have to replace dead hardware parts. And then have the client call saying his adobe products is messed up and wanting to know how it happened..
 
P

ProWraps™

Guest
i would like to see some documented proof of this. as far as adobe corrupting your system, yeah right.
 
GAC05

GAC05

Quit buggin' me
I think what they are saying from what I read on the adobe forum is that adobe's copy protection may not play well when being cloned onto a new hard drive.
It looks like it failed to work in a couple of cases and caused adobe products (only) to fail to run run on the drive that had been cloned.
Support's suggestion to fix it was to format the drive and re-install.
Not effecting the OS, but if you wanted your Photoshop or Illy to run again you might have to start over.

Looks like it might be a real issue for just a small number of users and not an attempt by adobe to stop it's product from being copied by drive cloning.

wayne k
guam usa
 
Techman

Techman

New Member
that makes sence,, their protection has a hissy fit whenever you change something in the machine,, if one were to clone a drive then it would see it as a change,, and thus force a reinstall if the activation will not work..
 
SignBurst PCs

SignBurst PCs

New Member
I think this is a hoax, or at least not applicable in all cases, as I have personally cloned and restored my drive several times with different versions of Adobe (including CS3). I have not restored a system with CS4 yet (as it is so new).

It is odd that some of you are finding CS4 to be slower than CS3. Adobe put a lot of effort into speeding up CS4. I haven't played around with the 32 Bit version of Photoshop much as we use the 64 Bit for a ll of our systems. The 64 Bit version is much faster than the 32 Bit (CS3 or CS4). That is to say, it is much faster on the systems we test on (SignBurst).

With the configurations we use, we have found no significant "slow down" due to any Adobe "services" either. Yes, they are there, but we don't even notice them.

Now CS3 does have some "licensing service" hickups that seem to be fixed in CS4 as we din't run into the problems with CS4 and we ran into them frequently in CS3. I wonder if this has anything to so with the OP's issues?
 
SignBurst PCs

SignBurst PCs

New Member
Believe me, we have had our issues with Flexnet. I am not going to go into detail, but I am pretty aware of the trouble it can cause if it isn't working correctly. But it's failure didn't render our computers useless, only the other Adobe software that relied on the Flexnet licensing. We only had these issues in CS3 and Adobe resolved them for us.

Also, it may have issues with certain disk cloning techniques, but not all. Like I said in a earlier post, I have "imaged" my disk and restored from the image without any issues using the backup utility built into Vista Ultimate. I have not tried other imaging software, so it may be a problem in other imaging backup software.

If in doubt, try it out. Make an image of your drive using your favorite software and restore that image to a clean hard drive (they are inexpensive these days). If the crap hits the fan, simply put your old drive back in.

Backing up is only part of a disaster recovery plan. You should also be testing your backups and making sure they can be restored.

Fred, thanks for posting this as it may lead some folks into testing their backups, if they are even backing up at all.
 
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