Saturday, December 08, 2007

Adobe Updater Crashes on Mac OS X and a Fix

Ok, so if you're like me, you got your Adobe Photoshop CS3 upgrade, and figured all those problems that have been building up from staying with the old Photoshop 7 would be eliminated?

What problems? Oh, all those failures from automatic updates.

So I was rather disappointed when every time I launched Photoshop, Adobe Updater would generate one of those... "This application has crashed unexpectedly would you like to report it to Apple..." dialogs. I even knew there had been some updates made available, but I couldn't get them because Adobe Update would crash anytime it was launched.

I've got a friend who's situation was even worse. His Adobe Updater was set to run on startup, and would crash his entire system every-time it launched.

So what's the solution? Well, it appears that it must be a permission issue with the updater needing to modify files it doesn't have enough access too.

We can solve this by opening Terminal (in your Utilities folder under Applications) and running a unix command line giving it full access to your system.
(Ok the following line displays poorly in the blogger template, however it should be easy to select and then cut and paste into your Terminal app.)
sudo /Applications/Utilities/Adobe\ Utilities.localized/Adobe\ Updater5/Adobe\ Updater.app/Contents/MacOS/Adobe\ Updater


Copying and pasting that into Terminal should cause it to ask for your password. Go ahead and type in your password. Now that should launch the updater app. Assuming you have admin rights and can use sudo, the application should have all the power over you system it needs to complete an update. I had to take a further step and install some updates separately. I think I had about 6 or 7 updates to install, and I'd always get an update failed message when I tried to do all of them. However, I did them one at a time, and eventually everything installed.

Now when Adobe Updater auto launches on my system, it no longer crashes. Yea!

I wish Adobe would spend as much time perfecting their updater app, as they have on their software. Aside from being a resource hog, Photoshop CS3 rocks!

Update: With this blog posting it would appear Adobe is aware of the issues, however, it doesn't imply they'll be able to solve them.

Update 2: Although this blog posting is more to do with the installer rather then the updater it sure points out that Adobe's weak link is in developing their installers.

Props go to Sjan.E in the Adobe user forums for the suggestion of using sudo in this thread.

37 comments:

Unknown said...

Thank you thank you thank you!!!

I have been pulling my hair out over this annoyance for over a month now!! And attempts to find an update to the updater on Adobe's site have been unsuccessful.

Glad to have this solved once and for all. Now I just have to download my 450MB of updates!

Unknown said...

I found this behavior was due to a bad .plist file: it was defaulting to /private/var as a place to save updates. While running Adobe Updater as root does work, it's "gentler" to just delete the Adobe / Reader / Adobe Update Manager plists from your home directory.

Man said...

Didn't seem to work for me...

Came out this message:

Adobe Updater(321,0xb00a1000) malloc: *** mmap(size=2097152) failed (error code=12)
*** error: can't allocate region
*** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug
Bus error

Unknown said...

I had the same issue with the Updater generating a Bus Error after the process grew to over 4GB of resident memory. How can Adobe not have fixed this yet?

Gavin said...

Didn't work for me - memory just grows as before. Deleting the updater doesn't work, as everytime I launch Reader, it reinstalls it :-( I have another MacPro at work which it doesn't happen on - I don't know if it has anything to do with the fact that that machine has a new version of CS (CS3), whereas the machine with the problem has a very old version (before they even called it CS). This is by far the most annoying thing that happens on my Mac!

Gavin said...

Looks like it is related to having a proxy (I have a PAC file). A fix is to turn off automatic updating. See:

http://muzso.hu/node/4265

and:

http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb402251&sliceId=2#head2

Unknown said...

thankyouverfuckingmuch

That one was driving me insane, and your solution worked perfectly.

I own you a beer.

pmhapp said...

Excellent! Thanks!

Justin Kent said...

Great! Looks like it's working for me. Thanks a lot.

Unknown said...

Same here: Updater worked on the MacPro, not on the MacBookPro. Until your Terminal script.

Thank you!!

PvdR said...

You're a super hero!!!. Thanks sooooo much !!!

It worked perfectly, exactly as stated.

Greg said...

This has been driving me crasy! Thanks for the fix

Unknown said...

You rock man! Fixed my problem that has plagued me for months

Unknown said...

thanks. spent weeks ...

Michael Louis said...

thank you!, just what the dr. ordered.

Jeff said...

I was able to eliminate the issue by going to /Users/(your user)/Library/Application Support/ and deleting the folder called "Updater 5". I believe a download got corrupted earlier and then Adobe updater could not launch until the previous Updater folder was eliminated.

Bottom line: Adobe Updater is an extremely finicky application. Try to avoid doing any other installs or downloads while using this app.

John T Davies said...

Got a new 17inch MBP, transferred over the activation, installed and ran the updater from the PS menu which crashed, tried it again from the utils/updater.app which also crashed, a quick Google and this popped up, ran it from the command line and it worked perfectly, many many thanks.

I've now got 524.3 MB of updates, including obviously the updater itself.

Thanks again for posting this it saved me a good 15 minutes of messing around.

-John-

Michael Laurence Olivier said...

I had begun to feel more and more hatred toward the word Adobe with each boot of my machine and subsequent "Adobe Update Failed" message. Thanks for Terminal cmd. It worked instantly.

Jeromy Camp Photo said...

thanks! could not update fresh install your instructions worked perfectly!

Unknown said...

Nice and clear. Worked like a charm. Thank you! --(Amazing that products from a company like Adobe should fail this way... Can't believe it.)

Unknown said...

Thanks Aric. Even though your post is years old, your solution helped out when I did a fresh install of CS3 on Snow Leopard.

You'd think Adobe would have these types of helpful answers on their site.

Unknown said...

You saved my sanity with such a simple fix that I had to say thank you. I chose to only download the updated updater application, exited from terminal and then used this new updater application from within Photoshop -- worked like a charm.

RealGrouchy said...

This did not work for me, but as Asa said, deleting [username]/Application Support/Adobe/Updater5

and selecting Help > Update in Photoshop seems to be doing the trick. (We'll see in an hour or so when it's done downloading)

- RG>

Unknown said...

Thnx

Steph D said...

Thanks so much for the suggestion... worked for me! I had to paste it in twice though. Weird.

krilli said...

Hey, thanks. Seems to have done the trick for me as well.

Unknown said...

Same problem with Adobe CS4 Master Collection. I ran:

sudo /Applications/Utilities/Adobe\ Utilities.localized/Adobe\ Updater6/Adobe\ Updater.app/Contents/MacOS/Adobe\ Updater

and was able to at least cause the installer to download patches. I'm still not able to run it from the GUI though... :-(

What is going on over at Adobe?

5 said...

You're a GENIUS...thanks for doing what F*#@ING Adobe can't

Unknown said...

Worked for me! Thanks for sharing this. You Rock!

Unknown said...

You rock!!!!!!

This was driving me batty for...well, long as I can remember.

Entered your command, and presto -- everything worked.

Thank you thank you thank you!

Unknown said...

You rock!!!!!!

This was driving me batty for...well, long as I can remember.

Entered your command, and presto -- everything worked.

Thank you thank you thank you!

Unknown said...

I am a new fan. Thanks so much!

Unknown said...

Fantastic. CS3 install on fresh Snow Leopard install - updater would fail every time. This command fixed it!

Foster-Coffelt Photography said...

Worked, wow thanks a ton!!

Anonymous said...

My updater was failing due to a non-persmissions-related error. I was getting the error "Could not load adobe_aum2pcd.bundle"
I fixed this by installing a fresh version of Adobe Updater, obtained here:
http://download.cnet.com/Adobe-Updater/3000-2191_4-84683.html

matthew cavanaugh said...

THANK YOU!!!

Unknown said...

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