I find “authorized” software, as a means of copy protection, extremely annoying. As a programmer, I’m forever mucking around with my drives, and software such as Adobe (almost Everything, but Photoshop annoys me the most) and NIK and MS Office et al, all require that you “deactivate/deauthorize” from one drive before you move the software to another.

Let’s leave aside the non-trivial issue of what happens if your drive goes south, and you don’t even have the opportunity to perform a polite deactivation… grrrrr…

Here’s how I do it, when I’m switching out an old drive for a new one, and I can deactivate:

NOTE:  I take NO responsibility for you trying this. It works for me, but if it doesn’t work for you, that’s sorta too bad, eh? Not my fault: I’m just CMA here. You are on your own.

That said, what I do is this:

1) take SuperDuper and clone the old drive to the new drive.

2) do NOT NOT NOT run anything on that new drive yet.

3) NOW go back to your OLD drive (the one you cloned FROM) and deactivate all the software you have that needs it. In the case of Adobe, do the heavy-duty deactivate,  NOT “suspend”.

4) That’s it. Now when you run your new drive, everything will “just work.” You do NOT need to activate each product. If you think about this a bit, it will make sense. Works perfectly for me.

BUT BE SURE that you do NOT try to run the software on the new drive UNTIL you have deactivated the software on the old drive AFTER the clone. If you forget, and try to run Photoshop without FIRST deactivating on the old drive, you’ll spend glorious hours in telephone hell explaining what you did to an overworked Adobe employee.