Unable to Authorize or De-authorize Digital Editions after hard drive cloned

Question

Hope someone can help with this one. I'm a public librarian and this problem is on behalf of an elderly customer who borrows Overdrive e-books through out library, downloads into Digital Editions and then transfers them across to a Kobo e-reader. I've taken this problem to Overdrive and they won't help. So this forum is the last chance for her to get this working. I'll summarise briefly:

Customer has a PC running Windows 10. She had a larger hard drive installed, and cloned all the contents of the old drive onto the new drive.
This has caused authorisation issues with Digital Editions that look as though they can be fixed by simply de-authorizing and then re-authorizing ADE and the e-reader.
Digital Editions is asking for Adobe ID and password before it will de-authorize.
Customer couldn't remember her password so she reset it.
Digital Editions refuses to recognise the new password. It looks as though she has to de-authorize with the old password (which she doesn't know).
So we're stuck. Can't de-authorize, can't re-authorize. Uninstalling and re-installing Digital Editions doesn't work and brings us back to the same problem.

Any ideas from anyone about the next steps? Many thanks in advance for any help.

Neil.

Its Me Too · Answer

Hi, I don't know how it works with an e-reader as I've only used ADI on my computer. I had trouble recently when with ADE 4.5 on a windows 8.1 pc. Couldn't get it to run, so tried uninstalling & re-installing ADI 4.0, but couldn't get it to authorize/unauthorize. What I ended up doing was using regedit to remove the activation key from the registry, then re-installing ADI 4.0 and was then able to do fresh authorization. These are the steps I used:

1. rename "My Digital Editions" folder to something like "My Digital Editions original" (if you haven't already done so -keeps any epubs you have already safe & stops confusion).

2. uninstall whatever edition you're using

3.use regedit to remove activation key (there are some instructions here https://helpx.adobe.com/digital-editions/kb/activation-errors-adobe-digital-editions.html)

4.re-install Digital Editions (in my case I chose to go back to 4.0)

5.re-activate (I did the anonymous activation).

You can get a copy of ADE 4.0 here: https://helpx.adobe.com/fr/digital-editions/kb/cant-install-digital-editions.html (page is in French but should auto translate. File is under manual installation).

Hope this helps

PS - if you do the anonymous activation like I did you can only read it on your PC - to transfer files from pc to read on an e-reader do the activation in step 5 with an Adobe id

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