Reactivating Adobe CS4 on my iMac OS Lion?

[dzncr8or]

I purchased the student version from Adobe a few years back for CS4 and I own the disks. I installed the Suite back then and it worked fine. Recently, I made a clone back up (Super Duper) of my internal hard drive to my external hard drive, also making it a boot disk with the Lion OS on it.

My internal hard drive crashed. I had a new internal hard drive installed and I installed Sierra OS. I realize CS4 will not work on Sierra. However, my CS4 will no longer work on my cloned boot external drive with Lion OS on it where it copied the CS4 Suite to. For example, when I boot from my external hard drive and when I click on Photoshop CS4, I get a dialogue box stating, "Could not open a scratch file because the disk is not available." When I click "OK" another dialogue box states, "Could not initialize Photoshop because the disk is not available."

I looked at all of my disks and do not see a serial number on any of them.

I cannot open any of my CS4 applications or files. Please help.

[gener7]

CS4 should work on Sierra. In order to install it, follow these instructions:

Installing Creative Suite on macOS 10.12 (Sierra)

For your external drive:

Scratch disk full and cannot open photoshop to fix it...

[dzncr8or]

Thanks, but I've read various online documentation that says Sierra doesn't support CS4. Also I do not have a .dmg file anywhere to launch. Don't see any on any of my Student version disks.

On my external boot drive, I have Lion OS. So if I can somehow get my CS4 reactivated from that drive, that will work fine for me. The question is how?

[John Waller]

Not supported doesn't mean won't run successfully. Just means Adobe hasn't tested it, cannot guarantee successful installation and won't help you in case of issues.

However Adobe does provide steps for installing CS4 on Sierra (refer the link provided by gener7 above) so there is an expectation that it will.

You can download the CS4 .dmg installer from Adobe

Download Adobe Creative Suite 4 (CS4) products

[dzncr8or]

Just found my serial number. Now what do I do? Is there an installer app on one of these disks somewhere.

Here are my disks:

Design Premium

1. Adobe CS4 Design Premium Content

2. Adobe Creative Suite 4 Application 1

3. Adobe Creative Suite 4 Application 2

[jbm007 · Accepted solution]

Installer disk is on CS4 application 1

When you load the disk the autorun function should start.

Depending on what you install you may or may not need disk 2

The CS4 premium content is just extra files and actions, and that you can use.

[dzncr8or]

Thank you!

I will give that a try tomorrow and let you know how it turns out. Thank you all for your help.

[dzncr8or]

I ran the Setup on the Application 1 disk and my C4 applications are now working and functioning properly! However, Photoshop would not. I was getting a dialogue box stating, "Scratch disk could not be found," and Photoshop would not launch. The key is to launch Photoshop and upon launching, hold down the Command-Option key and it gives you the opportunity to assign scratch disks. After I had assigned my scratch disks, Photoshop worked.

Thank you all for your help!