Program Installation Error(s)

[Jay06GTO]

I'm fairly new to the Mac world and recently purchased a brand new Mac Book Pro 13' Retina Display. To make a long story short, I was unable to retrieve some old files off of an external hard drive, due to the format of the hard drive(s) being 'Case Sensitive' and the Mac Book being 'Journaled.' After some back and forth, I had the new Mac reformatted to 'Case Sensitive' in order to obtain those files. Fast forward about a month...

Everything has been dandy and with my photography business, those files were essential. In addition, I decided to purchase Photoshop Elements 12 to go along with Lightroom 5 last night. Come to find out, PSE 12 is unable to be installed under the volume of 'Case Sensitive.' That's strange, considering LR5 (Adobe Product) has no issue being installed...Hmm. Now, I understand I could partition the hard drive, but in the end, all data will be lost. I have since transferred all existing data to a 'Journaled' hard drive to potentially make this transition easier.

Although, does anyone have ANY tips or recommendations on how I could avoid partitioning/reformatting my current hard drive in order to install this program? The last thing I want to do is go through the hassle of setting everything back up. I don't have the tools, knowledge, or time to do this myself. So, in the end, I may have to make a trip to the Apple store if I cannot resolve this myself. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

Jay

 

[Dark Dragoon]

Having Journaling enabled or not isn't the problem.

The problem is purely down to using a case sensitive file system.
Where the problem comes from is that some applications expect to be able to access a file that has a different case. So for example the application expects to find ImportantFile.bin but it is actually named importantfile.bin, this doesn't matter on a volume which isn't case sensitive as the capital letters are essentially ignored so the names are the same. However on a case sensitive volume the two names are treated differently and so the application is not able to access the file.

You will find that some applications will break this way. Some may not install at all, others can break in interesting ways during use as the files they expect to find don't exist.

Normally the main use for using a case sensitive filesystem is when you need to work closely with other systems which also use case sensitive file systems such as Linux. Unfortunately this is not how most people have OS X setup, so bugs due to this in programs are either not discovered or left unfixed.

The problem is that going from a case sensitive volume to a case insensitive volume you ended up with files that essentially have the same name, hence why you couldn't copy them off of the external drive. Though manually copying the files that had the same name to different locations would have worked.


Really the solution is unfortunately to back everything up and do a clean install, then copy your files back renaming any that have the same name. this is what I had to do many years back.