I installed Adobe InDesign CS2 on my last laptop about a month ago. CS2 is old; it came out in 2005 and runs under Rosetta, but it worked great on my MacBook Pro 2007 with its Core 2 Duo.
But that MacBook Pro was getting old, so work got me a shiny new one with an i7 inside. Nice! I used the Migration Assistant and pulled all my stuff over from backup, and was off and computing in no time.
But then yesterday I opened InDesign and it told me I had to reactivate. Stupid Adobe. I went through the motions and it denied me because I needed to deactivate the old machine. I pulled it out and did so. Now, trying to activate the new machine game me a useful error message:
Repair 93:-4
Oh, of course. That means… who has any idea what that means?
Google told me it meant “invalid serial number,” but since I was reading the serial number off the box I doubted that that was correct.
I tried the obvious things like a reinstall, an uninstall and a reinstall, reading the readme and doing all the things it told me to do to uninstall, then a reinstall, etc. No dice.
This was 2am, so I went to bed and in the morning I called Adobe Support. The tech was bright and chipper as he told me that CS2 wasn’t supported on Snow Leopard, but I could shell out $200 to get an upgrade to CS5. I was not amused.
So I started doing some more spelunking. I found a few more files to try deleting, but nothing seemed to help. Then I found an article on Adobe’s knowledge base that talked about setting permissions on /Library/Preferences/Adobe Systems/. I went over there and deleted the file entirely, relaunched, and activation went off without a hitch.
So if you’re seeing Repair 93:-4, just delete /Library/Preferences/Adobe Systems/ and relaunch; you should be good to go. If only their support line knew.