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Re-Authorisation of Notion

A Forum to Discuss NOTION

Re-Authorisation of Notion

Postby freistil-tom » Sat Jul 02, 2011 9:04 am

Hi,
i had an issue with my Startup-Drive on my MacPro early 2008 and so had to reload the complete Stuff from my Time machine. Now when opening Notion, it asks for the installation code but when i enter the code, it says, that the code is already used.
Can anybody give me an advice on how to reauthorise Notion?
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Re: Re-Authorisation of Notion

Postby Eftwyrd » Sat Jul 02, 2011 12:24 pm

I had the same problem a few months ago. Just write the tech support an e-mail and they will help you.
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Re: Re-Authorisation of Notion

Postby freistil-tom » Sat Jul 02, 2011 5:25 pm

Thanks for your reply!
That´s what I did already. But they are out of busyness till Tuesday because of Independence Day!
So if you know how to manage the problem and if an action of the support is not necessary, I would be thankful of good advice.
Tom
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Re: Re-Authorisation of Notion

Postby Surfwhammy » Sat Jul 02, 2011 7:25 pm

QUESTION: Did you do a full restore of the hard drive from Time Machine, or did you only recover selected applications?

The reason I ask is that doing a full restore of the hard drive from Time Machine should not require reauthorizing everything, although this mostly is a guess, since I use SuperDuper! rather than Time Machine on my Mac Pro and iMac . . .

PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE

To avoid this type of problem in the future, it is useful to know that while Time Machine is very handy, it is better to do a full low-level image of the hard drive, which you can do with SuperDuper! (Shirt Pocket) . . .

SuperDuper! (Shirt Pocket)

The free version of SuperDuper! does this, and the full version is reasonably priced at $27.95 (US) . . .

I use the full version of SuperDuper!, and it makes it very easy to replace a damaged hard drive without needing to reauthorize everything. There are additional features in the full version of SuperDuper! that are well worth the cost . . .

[NOTE: SuperDuper! is done by David Nanian, who with Michael Strickman did the BRIEF programming editor, where the company in those days was UnderWare, Inc., so he really knows his stuff . . . ]

BRIEF programming editor (wikipedia)

On a Mac Pro, the strategy is to get a 2TB internal hard drive from Other World Computing for purposes of doing backup drive images, but on an iMac, MacBook Pro, or MacBook Air you can use an external drive from LaCie, where the LaCie d2 Quadra Hard Disk is a personal favorite, since it supports FireWire 400 and 800, USB 2.0, and eSATA and does not cost much more than an internal hard drive . . .

If you keep large data files separate from application folders and so forth, then you only need to do a bootable image of the boot partition, and with SuperDuper! you can do incremental updates to the original full backup image, really . . .

Really!

P. S. You might try repairing permissions, which you can do with Disk Utility, which is found in the Utilities folder under Applications. I doubt that this will resolve the problem, but it is worth trying . . .
The Surf Whammys

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Re: Re-Authorisation of Notion

Postby freistil-tom » Sat Jul 02, 2011 7:57 pm

Hi Surfwhammy,

I did a full restore with Time Machine and there was no problem beside the one with Notion!
All other applications - and there is really a whole lot of them - worked fine.
Notion was - so far - the only application that asked for authorization.
In the MacPro i use 4 HDDs with all in all 5TB of disk space and i back up to 4TB external Raid (Firewire 800) but only the most important disks Startup and Projects with Time machine running manual.

Tom
Last edited by freistil-tom on Sun Jul 03, 2011 6:32 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Re-Authorisation of Notion

Postby Eftwyrd » Sun Jul 03, 2011 5:10 am

In my case, the support had to delete my "old" registration and then it was possible to register Notion again. So I don't know how to do it without the support.
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Re: Re-Authorisation of Notion

Postby freistil-tom » Sun Jul 03, 2011 6:24 am

That´s what I thought.
So it looks I have to wait till Tuesday. I had no problem to reauthorize my Notion SLE that i bought before Notion3, but i think i installed the SLE only on one machine and so there was another authorization left.

Thanks for your info!
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Re: Re-Authorisation of Notion

Postby Surfwhammy » Sun Jul 03, 2011 10:35 am

freistil-tom wrote:Hi Surfwhammy,

I did a full restore with Time Machine and there was no problem beside the one with Notion!
All other applications - and there is really a whole lot of them - worked fine.
Notion was - so far - the only application that asked for authorization.
In the MacPro i use 4 HDDs with all in all 5TB of disk space and i back up to 4TB external Raid (Firewire 800) but only the most important disks Startup and Projects with Time machine running manual.

Tom


This is the same setup I use on my Mac Pro, and I really like the ease of swapping internal hard drives, which I am planning to do before upgrading to Mac OS X Lion, where I will do a full drive image of the Snow Leopard hard drive to a new 2TB internal drive and then remove the new 2TB drive to save it as a backup, followed by doing the Mac OS X Lion update on the Snow Leopard hard drive, where the general idea is that if there are any problems with applications running in Mac OS X Lion, I can revert to Snow Leopard simply by doing an internal hard drive swap, and it should be possible to do the full drive image and not need actually to remove the backup drive, since with SuperDuper! I can do the required partitioning and so forth, which is what I used to do the same thing when I moved from Leopard to Snow Leopard . . .

When I was doing development work in the Windows universe, I used a similar utility called "Drive Image (PowerQuest)" and JAZ drives (SCSI), which made it possible to do destructive application testing quickly, since I could restore a test machine in approximately 15 minutes to a known state . . .

The key is that the drive imaging utility needs to copy everything and to be able to put it back where it needs to be, including all the typically non-visible bits, and when possible it needs to be able to do a restore very quickly, which is where having as small a "footprint" as possible for the "known state" is helpful, since the smaller the footprint, the faster a machine can be "flattened" and then restored to a pre-test, known and safe configuration, which is important when one is testing installation software that has the potential to do gnarly things, which in the Windows universe can hose a machine easily and might be the case in the Mac universe as well (which is likely, since I did something a few years ago when running Terminal that hosed an iMac so badly that after trying a virtual festival of strategies under the guidance of high-level, elevated AppleCare specialists, the AppleCare folks decided that the only thing to do was to flatten the hard drive and start with a clean install, where all I did in Terminal was change the moniker for the Administrator account, which appeared to be a simple change, except that it is not really supposed to be done the way I did it, hence the rule here in the sound isolation studio since then is to stay out of the low-level UNIX part of Mac OS X) . . .

HYPOTHESIS

Recalling a bit more information about the stellar third-part Windows drive imaging utility ("Drive Image"), it might be that the Notion 3 authorization software algorithm looks at the size of the hard drive partition, and if this is the case, then if the hard drive partition is not exactly the same size as the original hard drive onto which Notion 3 was installed and authorized, this could be the problem. The "Drive Image" utility had the ability to match the partition of a hard drive to the partition information of the stored drive image, which for a variety of reasons was very important . . .

Typically, authorization software looks at a variety of hardware and software values and then computes what in the Windows universe is called Globally Unique Identifier (GUID), so if the computed GUID does not match, then the authorizing algorithm returns "not authorized", and the program will not run . . .

Globally Unique Identifier (wikipedia)

GUID Partition Table (wikipedia)

As I recall, it also is possible that hard drives have an internal identifier like a serial number or whatever, although I have not checked this in a while, and I have no idea whether it is important in the Mac universe . . .

I suppose that you could try repairing permissions, but if everything except Notion 3 is working, then it probably is best to wait until Tuesday July 5, 2011 and to get the problem fixed with help from Notion Music technical support, although I repair permissions every so often on the Mac Pro and have had no problems with all various authorization software . . .

And since this is an interesting problem, when I get the new internal hard drive, I might do an experiment with SuperDuper! to determine whether its full drive image cloning has the same Notion 3 authorization problem . . .

My thinking on this, which in some respects is philosophical but has a foundation in Computer Science, is that SuperDuper! gets everything, which has the consequence of making it possible to clone a hard drive with such precision that Mac OS X and all the various applications simply do not know whether they ares running on the original hard drive or a cloned hard drive, which when you think about it for a while essentially defeats all the licensing, anti-piracy, and other stuff that Apple adds to Mac OS X, which is similar to all the licensing, anti-piracy, and other stuff that Microsoft adds to Windows . . .

So, while one certainly can expect that Apple should know how to clone a Mac hard drive, I am not entirely convinced that Apple has such a strong incentive to do a complete and total clone, which is where the expertise of the Shirt Pocket folks comes into play, because in great contrast they have a strong incentive to discover all the subtle nuances and to get everything cloned rather than almost but not exactly everything . . .

And for reference, when I was doing the Windows hard drive cloning and testing, I was a Microsoft Solution Provider and I had all the required developer and testing licenses, so what I was doing was legal for me to do and was a standard aspect of what installation program developers do, so it was not a big deal, but it was a bit of FUN to know how to do it, really . . .

Really! :ugeek:

P. S. I read your post a few more times, and it is very important to understand that backing-up applications is very different from cloning a hard drive partition, to the point that for practical purposes (a) I would not expect a backup of an application to have all the associated information required for authorization purposes but (b) I would expect a cloned hard drive to have all the associated information required for authorization purposes . . .

[NOTE: I did a bit more researching, and it appears that Time Machine uses a Universally Unique Identifier (UUID) to identify backup files, as well as using the MAC address of the computer, and there is the additional matter of needing to start from the Mac OS X DVD to begin a Time Machine restore, and so forth. SuperDuper! recommends creating what it calls a "sandbox", which is a bootable clone of a hard drive on either another internal drive or on a bootable external Firewire drive, so instead of starting from the Mac OS X DVD, you boot the machine from the "sandbox" drive and then do the restore from the "sandbox" drive. And part of the process of creating, testing, and verifying a "sandbox" involves determining that you can run the computer from the "sandbox" and everything works correctly. And so far I have not found anything that suggests there are third-party application authorization problems with SuperDuper! created and verified "sandbox" clones . . . ]

Universally Unique Identifier (wikipedia)

MAC Address (wikipedia)

It is possible that the particular authorization software used by Notion 3 is sufficiently smart to do additional checks to make it difficult if not impossible to use a cloned hard drive, but perhaps not . . .

If you already know this, then great, but my thinking on providing the information is that other folks who might not know about it will find it helpful, which is fabulous . . .

Fabulous! :)
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