Two days used up with installation of Adobe's Master Collection CS3

I hate to rant but boy oh boy... Adobe's CS3 installer should be taken out back and be put out of it's misery I think.

These last two days I've been wrestling with installation of CS3 Master Collection. That's the package with everything in it.. it's a monster of an install. Over 20 gigs of stuff I think. Anyways, I found it amazingly slow to install (3 hours just to install) and wasn't much of a happy camper on my 5th try to get it to install successfully on my laptop.

Anyways, I thought I'd chronicle my efforts here in case somebody else has a problem and is looking to solve it.

First up, I have two computers here. One is a desktop and one is a laptop. Like a lot of developers I have my desktop as my main workhorse and the laptop runs around with me when I have to visit clients or work out of the office. Both are sufficient enough to run the apps CS3 Master Collection has. Don't believe the box where it says you need a certain resolution to make it work, my laptop has only 1024 x 768 and all apps seem to run fine (a bit cramped sometimes though).

So my trials:

1. Uninstall the Production Collection on both computers (I had this before the Master Collection)

2. Reboot

3. Try to install Master Collection, it fails on the first disc at 100%. Just sits there like a lump on a log doing nothing. Nothing... Did I mention it didn't do anything?

4. Force quit installer. Uninstall through program thingy that lets you uninstall stuff

5. Reboot

6. Run Adobe cleaner (somewhere on Adobe's site.. don't have link at the moment) but didn't press "no" at the end which seems counterintuitive to me.. but in essence it asks you if you want to just view a preview and not make changes. Oh well, so I didn't really run it, but I thought I had thinking "wow, that was fast".

Anyways...

7. Reboot

Have I mentioned how much I don't like rebooting?

8. Install again from disc 1

Everything went well (5 hours later of course). Go figure. So it seems you don't always have to run the cleaner. Maybe I was just lucky.. or just unlucky on the first try.

Laptop time:

1. Same as 1 above

2. Same as 2 above

3. Try to install. It makes it past the first disc to fail at 3.33% on the second disc. It just sits there failing silently.. crapola

4. Force quit

5. Uninstall from program thingy in windows

6. reboot

7. run cleaner from Adobe

8. reboot

9. I'll make this simple, I did steps 3 to 8 two more times with the same results.

Go to bed, it's now 1 in the morning.. bleh

Next morning:

10. Try one more time with the above, no luck. Finally call up Adobe, they ask me to do a bunch of weird things like reregister the MSI installer etc, says that all will be well and I get off the phone

11. reboot (getting a bit repetitive now isn't it). Oh yeah, I ran the cleaner too. On the advice of another person I also ran ccleaner (google it)

12. Try to install, it fails on the same spot. At this time it might be interesting to note that in the event viewer for windows it was telling me that it was having trouble extracting an amoeba PNG file and in turn the after effects something-or-other-installer was failing. This is in the event viewer by the way. Doesn't say anything in the installer

13. Call Adobe again, get a different person. They suggest copying the files to my hard drive. I mention that it's a laptop and I don't happen to have 50GB of free space to copy and then install the files. But they did give me an idea and I dragged out my trusty USB hard drive with 80GB of space on it.

I started to copy the files over while on hold while the person went to go get divine intervention before I exploded on the phone because I had just spent 2 days trying to get this stuff installed on two computers.

Here's the interesting part. The copy failed. It wouldn't copy over one of the cab files. A cab file is like a zip file, it's huge. 500MB of data actually. Obviously an important one because this is the one that was causing the installer to fail. Not really sure what to do at this time I hand copy over all the other files doing a compare to make sure I got them all. All that was left was this one very important 500MB cab file.

Now my idea at this point was to get Adobe to provide me a download link to this one file (not sure if they would have done it though) but while still on hold it came to me that I had the downloaded version of the Production Collection. So I looked around in there for this 500MB file that I needed and low and behold! There it was.

So I copied that over and copied over the rest of the discs to my portable hard drive. That took a while.

14. Install from portable HD. Now this here is a bit of tricky situation because the installer is expecting you to have discs and when copying I can tell you that it's a total pain in to even try to copy over the files to the right spots because the directories are all named the same. So I copied them into "disc1" "disc2" etc.

15. After it finishes up with disc1 it asks to put in disc to drive E... well, drive E is my USB hard drive.. hrmm

16. Move the directory from disc2 directory to disc1 directory, after renaming the same named directory in the disc1 directory. No go..

17. Move the directory to the folder I made in the hard drive. No go

18. Move the directory to the root of the hard drive. It goes. Weird.. I didn't run the installer from the root to begin with.

19. Repeat as needed number 18. All I did was move directories back and forth and pressed OK and all was well.

So that is the chronicles of my install. Adobe is going to be sending me some non faulty discs which is nice. I can't help but wonder how my desktop got installed properly then. There was no damage on the discs.

Well, hope that helps somebody. What a lot of typing.

Posted by Graeme at September 21, 2007 12:01 PM