Photoshop CS will not load, activation requested without hardware change

GG
Posted By
gerald_garcia
May 6, 2004
Views
1314
Replies
19
Status
Closed
When I start Photoshop CS, after the splash screen, font loading, twain initialisation, brushes etc I receive the error message that I have an unrecoverable hardware problem and the program stops.

I have re-installed my Windows fonts, reset Photoshop preferences and defragged the hard disk (I have 25 Gig free and 512 RAM). I have also reinstalled Photoshop in Safe mode – all to no avail. (I did the above many times)

HOWEVER…

an interesting thing happened when I uninstalled a program called BootXP, which gives me different boot screens when I boot XP.

I tried reinstalling Photoshop CS and it said that I had to re-activate, although I had not changed any hardware! My copy is paid for and a legal upgrade from Photoshop 7.

I suspect that Photoshop is writing to my boot sector – I don’t mind, but the program still won’t work – same error message as before.

Please, please can someone help me or I will apply for a refund – my product is an update from Photoshop 7, which still works perfectly fine – and yes, I also tried uninstalling Photoshop 7 and reinstalling CS.

I do not want to have to reformat my carefully set up system to get this program to work…

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DM
dave_milbut
May 6, 2004
you should be able to reactivate automatically by pushing a button on the activation screen. failing that you can call adobe and reactivate. yes, the activation tech. writes to the boot sector.
DP
Daryl_Pritchard
May 6, 2004
Gerald,

As Dave mentions, reactivation shouldn’t be a problem as your machine is the same as PSCS was originally activated on. For clarification, you can reactivate as many times as you need to on the same machine, without that affecting your two allowable activations. The two activations are for allowing installation of PSCS on a desktop and laptop PC, or similar situations where you might have a primary and secondary PC for use with PSCS.

Most boot managers modify the boot sector, so removal of BootXP quite likely affected the boot sector which in turn affected the PSCS activation rectord, hence the prompt to reactivate.

Regards,

Daryl
GG
gerald_garcia
May 6, 2004
Thanks for the quick response, but I’m still not able to get past the error message – perhaps this is caused by some other program on the computer? Does anyone know of any incompatibilities such as Boot XP?
I will try to remove programs one at a time and let you know!
DP
Daryl_Pritchard
May 7, 2004
Gerald,

Unless I’ve missed something here, you have not received any error message. Rather, you simply received a notice that reactivation is required. If you interpret that as an error because you’ve already activated once and feel you shouldn’t have to again on this same PC, then join the crowd. The activation process for PSCS is not without its share of flaws, and if you’re prompted to reactivate then doing so is usually quick and painless via the internet, and only a bit slower if done manually by phone. In other words, just think of this as an inconvenience, but not truly an error.

I don’t know how BootXP works, but if you run PSCS under each boot configuration (such as if one is for WinXP and the other Win2K), you might be prompted to activate/reactivate for each scenario. It likely all depends upon how BootXP modifies your boot sector. That is, if PSCS writes its activation record to the same area of the boot sector as used by BootXP under one boot configuration, then booting to the other configuration may hide the former boot sector area and the activation record. But, you’re still on the same machine, so once you reactivate there, you should be good to go with either boot configuration.

Hope that helps,

Daryl
GG
gerald_garcia
May 7, 2004
Thanks Daryl

The reason I removed the offending BootXP program in the first place was because of the "Unable to continue because of a hardware or system error." message –
this is what I wrote at the beginning of my original post –

"When I start Photoshop CS, after the splash screen, font loading, twain initialisation, brushes etc I receive the error message that I have an unrecoverable hardware problem and the program stops.

I have re-installed my Windows fonts, reset Photoshop preferences and defragged the hard disk (I have 25 Gig free and 512 RAM). I have also reinstalled Photoshop in Safe mode – all to no avail. (I did the above many times)"

So I still get this message even after the second activation – The final thing which loads before I get the error (as far as I can ascertain) is the part where it says "reading brushes", or possibly "reading contours". I still can’t get the thing to load even after deleting the pref file and checking the fonts and removing the fax printer. I had Acrobat 6 Pro installed before – could this cause a problem?

Any help would be most welcome as I’ve tried all the recommended steps over the last 3 days and it’s getting frustrating!
GG
gerald_garcia
May 7, 2004
Thanks Dave – does this mean that, as I have now unwittingly used up my two activations, I will need to phone Adobe if I want to install on a second machine?

I don’t think I read anywhere in the setup instructions that I had to disable any boot program – presumably any bootloaders (eg for booting into different versions of Windows) would also have a similar effect? Perhaps this should be mentioned in the documentation for Photoshop CS, or did I miss something?
DM
dave_milbut
May 7, 2004
as I have now unwittingly used up my two activations,

no. the 2 activations were on the same box (right?) so any further attempt to activate that box will be treated as a "re"activation and should go through automatically.
DP
Daryl_Pritchard
May 7, 2004
Gerald,

Although not offering any help, I just thought I’d apologize for not noticing the comment about your error…no less in that very first line of your original post. Even reading it through twice last night, I must’ve been more tired than I realized, missing it both times.

Good luck getting the problem resolved. I’ve used BootMagic quite extensively in the past, but not ever since moving to WinXP eliminated my need for multiple operating systems. I never saw any errors with older versions of Photoshop of this nature, where the use of a boot manager was suspected as the culprit. Although unfamiliar with BootXP, I really doubt it was a factor in your PS startup problem but it would remain an issue where the reactivation is concerned.

Regards,

Daryl
GG
gerald_garcia
May 7, 2004
Hi Dave

Yes the two activations were on the same box – the second activation implied that I had changed hardware (which I hadn’t – I only disabled a program), so I went ahead and re-activated.

I was just wondering if I am still eligible to install PS on another machine now that I have effectively activated it twice…

Anyway the question is mainly academic as I can’t get PS to start in the first place!

Thanks again for taking the time to answer
DM
dave_milbut
May 7, 2004
I was just wondering if I am still eligible to install PS on another machine now that I have effectively activated it twice…

should be no problem. you’ve only activated one machine. the system will recognize that the checksum for all the hardware is the same and hasn’t change and you shouldn’t be charged any extra activations. so even though you’ve had to activate twice (several, whatever) times, they’ve all been on the same box so you’re still on only your first "official" activation.
DM
dave_milbut
May 7, 2004
Anyway the question is mainly academic as I can’t get PS to start in the first place

i’m sorry if i’m forgetting, but have you reset the prefrences?

Mathias Vejerslev "How to delete/reset Photoshop preferences" 2/11/03 1:04pm </cgi-bin/webx?50>
GG
gerald_garcia
May 7, 2004
Hi Dave
Thanks for the reassurance re the activation. I’ll post back if and when I need to use a second machine.

Regarding the non-start of PS – I have indeed reset preferences – I
1)pressed ctrl+shift+alt on starting
2)when that didn’t work, I deleted the Photoshop CS pref file in Documents and Settings.

Unfortunately that didn’t work.

I also uninstalled fonts and used only minimum required for Windows – I also checked for damaged fonts using Proxima Fontexpert (great program by the way).

I searched for and removed all adobefnt*.lst files

I tried removing color profiles, but not sure which ones to remove.

Last thing to come up on screen when initialising is, I think "reading brushes

Any help welcome before I brace myself (and system) for reformat!

Thanks in advance
DM
dave_milbut
May 7, 2004
try to uninstall and reinstall photoshop via add remove programs before reformatting.
DP
Daryl_Pritchard
May 7, 2004
Gerald,

I’m surprised at both myself and Dave, in that neither of us have yet asked one very obvious question: What motherboard are you using? There have been known motherboards in the past that had hardware problems sufficient to cause Photoshop to be inoperative. Also, have you successfully installed and run an earlier version of PS on this same system?

I don’t know if you have any drive imaging program such as Drive Image or Ghost, but if you do I would suggest making an image of your current drive so that you can easily return to your current state of operation if a reformat and rebuild of your software installation doesn’t yield any correction of the problem. That is, going through a similar process to troubleshoot a PSCS problem I ran into once, I imaged my WinXP system drive partition and then wiped it. Once WinXP was reinstalled and all current updates applied, I next reinstalled PSCS and found the problem I’d observed was still present. So, rather than go through a full reinstall of all my software, I restored my system drive image and just shrugged off the PSCS problem as a nuisance. Unfortunately your problem is more than a nuisance…it’s an outright failure that I hope you can find a solution for.

Good luck,

Daryl
GG
gerald_garcia
May 7, 2004
Hi Daryl and Dave

First of all, thanks for taking the time to try and help me – I’m sure that you guys must have better things to do.

Very good advice to save an image of my drive – I’ll try to work out how to do it.

I have used and upgraded Photoshop from version 3 through to 7.01, all without problems (except that I had to renew prefs once or twice…)

My motherboard is an Abit BD711 RAID running two 120G hard disks in a non-raid config. I have a 2.4 mhz P4 and 512 meg RAM. 30 Gig at least of free space. As far as I’m aware, there are no unusual overclocks or anything on my system.

As PS7 seems to have worked fine for the last year and a half, I might stick with it as I have to get on with normal life and work(!) – I use PS for image editing in web graphics and the occasional print job, and PS7 is fine for that.

I’m reluctant to totally hose the system for the few performance/cosmetic gains of PSCS costing me even more days of work, without a guarantee that it will eventually run!

Thanks so much for the help and I’ll post if anything transpires – especially if it could be of help to anyone else in a similar (miserable) position!

All the best

Gerald
DM
dave_milbut
May 7, 2004
good luck gerald.
L
Larry
Jan 18, 2005
In article ,
says…
Thanks Daryl

The reason I removed the offending BootXP program in the first place was because of the "Unable to continue because of a hardware or system error." message –
this is what I wrote at the beginning of my original post –
"When I start Photoshop CS, after the splash screen, font loading, twain initialisation, brushes etc I receive the error message that I have an unrecoverable hardware problem and the program stops.

I have re-installed my Windows fonts, reset Photoshop preferences and defragged the hard disk (I have 25 Gig free and 512 RAM). I have also reinstalled Photoshop in Safe mode – all to no avail. (I did the above many times)"

So I still get this message even after the second activation – The final thing which loads before I get the error (as far as I can ascertain) is the part where it says "reading brushes", or possibly "reading contours". I still can’t get the thing to load even after deleting the pref file and checking the fonts and removing the fax printer. I had Acrobat 6 Pro installed before – could this cause a problem?

Any help would be most welcome as I’ve tried all the recommended steps over the last 3 days and it’s getting frustrating!

I got that error once after removing the drive that was used for the "scratch drive"… PhotoShop did not find a second hard drive and crashed with that same hardware error.

The only way I could fix it was to install a second hard drive, THEN re- activate, then set the scratch drive setting so it wouldn’t look for a D:\ drive, then shut down photoshop, shut down the computer, remove the second drive, then re-boot.

So the question is:

Did you do anything that renamed your drives or re-distributed the alphabet on your scratch disk??


Larry Lynch
Mystic, Ct.
L
Larry
Jan 18, 2005
In article ,
says…
Hi Dave

Yes the two activations were on the same box – the second activation implied that I had changed hardware (which I hadn’t – I only disabled a program), so I went ahead and re-activated.

I was just wondering if I am still eligible to install PS on another machine now that I have effectively activated it twice…

Anyway the question is mainly academic as I can’t get PS to start in the first place!
Thanks again for taking the time to answer

1.un-install Photoshop

2. use regedit to feret out and remove ALL REFERENCES to PhotoShop from the registry.

3. re-boot and re-install PhotoShop and re-register.


Larry Lynch
Mystic, Ct.
S
Scotius
Jan 19, 2005
On Tue, 18 Jan 2005 11:31:42 -0500, Larry
wrote:

In article ,
says…
Thanks Daryl

The reason I removed the offending BootXP program in the first place was because of the "Unable to continue because of a hardware or system error." message –
this is what I wrote at the beginning of my original post –
"When I start Photoshop CS, after the splash screen, font loading, twain initialisation, brushes etc I receive the error message that I have an unrecoverable hardware problem and the program stops.

I have re-installed my Windows fonts, reset Photoshop preferences and defragged the hard disk (I have 25 Gig free and 512 RAM). I have also reinstalled Photoshop in Safe mode – all to no avail. (I did the above many times)"

So I still get this message even after the second activation – The final thing which loads before I get the error (as far as I can ascertain) is the part where it says "reading brushes", or possibly "reading contours". I still can’t get the thing to load even after deleting the pref file and checking the fonts and removing the fax printer. I had Acrobat 6 Pro installed before – could this cause a problem?

Any help would be most welcome as I’ve tried all the recommended steps over the last 3 days and it’s getting frustrating!

I got that error once after removing the drive that was used for the "scratch drive"… PhotoShop did not find a second hard drive and crashed with that same hardware error.

The only way I could fix it was to install a second hard drive, THEN re- activate, then set the scratch drive setting so it wouldn’t look for a D:\ drive, then shut down photoshop, shut down the computer, remove the second drive, then re-boot.

So the question is:

Did you do anything that renamed your drives or re-distributed the alphabet on your scratch disk??

Uninstall Photoshop completely.

Run regedit to open the registry editor. Remove ALL references to Photoshop that you can find. Delete those values. Then close out of regedit. (Note: You click "Run" in the start menu, and type in "regedit" or "regedit.exe" to run that program)

Shut the computer down.

Start the computer up and reinstall Photoshop.

I’d be very surprised if that didn’t solve the issue. A lot of time when you have uninstalled something there’s information in the registry that is pertinent to the program, and continues to screw things up even after you try a reinstall. Good luck with this.

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