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Eric_MB
Participating Frequently
November 2, 2020
Question

How to get a new installation of CC to find already installed apps like Photoshop or Lightroom?

  • November 2, 2020
  • 2 replies
  • 307 views

I just did a clean installation of Win 10. Beeing a good boy I had all my CC apps like Photoshop and Lightroom on a different disk so that they were unaffacted by this. However, Adobe CC was ofc wiped, so I had to reinstall that. Upon logging in to the new installation of Adobe CC I now see that it wants me to reinstall all Adobe apps. It cant find the already present apps that are still installed to the unaffected drive.

 

  • The first obvious step was to change the folder in which CC puts new apps to point to the catalog with the already present apps. That didn't help. Now CC know where to look for the apps, but it still doesn't find those that are already present in the folder. 
  • The second step, which I found here on the forums, was to rename the old opm.db file from C:\Users\owner\AppData\Local\Adobe\OOBE thus forcing the program to create a new one. Didn't work.
  • The third step was to change the permissions according to this post: https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-cloud/kb/configuration-error.html . That didn't work either. I was however never able to set the [USER] special permissions (that particular choice was greyed out) so I set full control instead. This was the only deviation and I "think" it shouldn't matter.


So does anybody have any other suggestion about what to do? The "easy" fix is of course to reinstall all the apps. But I would prefer to find another solution so that I don't have to try and figure out where all my preferences, presets, fonts and etc. are stored for each app and then move and reinstall those too. 


I can't believe that Adobe CC doesn't just have a "refresh" button to scan for already installed apps. Doing a fresh installation of windows now and then is recommended, and keeping all important programs/apps on a different drive to not having to reinstall those too is like Computer 101. So how on earth can't Adobe CC support that?

Btw, the apps still still starts if I go to their folder and use their exe-file. But I won't be getting any updates if CC doesn't find them so I still need CC to get on board. 

This topic has been closed for replies.

2 replies

John T Smith
Community Expert
John T SmithCommunity Expert
Community Expert
November 2, 2020

I have been using Windows since the relatively primitive version 3, which was before Win98 and so on... and my non-Microsoft employee knowledge, based on a lot of reading since that early version, is that Microsoft has "fairly" strict provisions for how programs are installed to then work properly with Windows

 

So...

 

First, you do not edit the registry... the install program does that while making sure that all of the program entries are put in the correct place

 

Second, please post the link of the article that says that Adobe does not use the "Windows recognized" process during install

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Eric_MBAuthor
Participating Frequently
November 2, 2020

You and me both bro, I still fondly remember Win 3.11 🙂

Actually you do sometimes edit the registry. I really do try to avoid it though, far to easy to screw things up by misstake and it's really quite beyond my level of competence. I'm just a script kiddie when it comes to that. 

And secondly, I wasn't refering to an article there 🙂 I know however that CC sometimes don't recognize properly installed (and thus in the windows registry) apps in just the same way as I am experiencing now. And besides, all the other fixes mentioned here and in other Adobe articles don't mention the windows registry at all. That is why my hunch is that this is more of a CC-related problem than a Win registry-problem. But I am in no way sure about it, so that is why asked you if you were sure about that beeing the cause 🙂

I actually cloned the entire C: before doing the clean installation of Win 10. Will try and see if I can find the registry entries for LR and see what they look like.

While I'm down the registry rabbit hole, anybody else that has some theory about how to get CC find those apps? 

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Eric_MBAuthor
Participating Frequently
November 2, 2020

Apperently I cant edit my own posts. So here is an "edit" of my last post 🙂 

While I'm down the registry rabbit hole, anybody else that has some theory about how to get CC find those apps?  Can you think on something other that the registry that can cause this? Or does anybody else has any ideas?

(I realised it was a bit rude to ask for other peoples input instead of asking you for other ideas. That was not my intent, sorry 🙂 ) 

John T Smith
Community Expert
John T SmithCommunity Expert
Community Expert
November 2, 2020

>clean installation of Win 10

 

That means you have a new System Registry... which is where Windows keeps track of installed programs (among other things)

 

Without doing an install so the System Registry is correct, Windows doesn't know how to use 'saved' programs

 

Go to the Search bar at the top of http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/default.aspx to find articles to learn about the System Registry

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Eric_MBAuthor
Participating Frequently
November 2, 2020

Thank's for the quick reply 🙂 Are you in fact sure that this is registry related? I don't want to start editing the system registry if I'm not relatively sure that it's related to my current problem, and I was under the impression that CC basically has it own eqvivalence to the registry.

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