Changing the serial number of an FCP Studio 2 install

Is there any way to change the serial number of FCP studio 2 once its installed?

The backstory is that my favorite - but grossly technically inept - client had their tech guy install Final Cut 6 way back when they bought it. I don't know what happened, but for some nebulous reason, he installed it using his serial number. I figured that out when I went to install the rest of the Studio package today and saw that the serial numbers on their box didn't match what was installed.

So I removed FCP with this program:

[www.digitalrebellion.com]

which seemed to do a solid job of grouping all the elements and clearing them, but some reciept or some part of the registration must still be around, because when I re-installed FCP Studio 2, it never asked me for my license number.

Is there a way to re-register it with a different serial number? Or is there a better way to completely uninstall & re-install & re-register FCP? There's a lot of info about uninstalling Compressor, but nothing about re-doing the whole suite.

IMHO - start over CLEAN. Too many things can go wrong if something is left behind.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

How clean is clean? Re-doing the whole OS?

Any good links/tutorials/reference points for how to start over with OS X?

You can never be too CLEAN

It tightens up the systems' overall performance to do a full wipe & reinstall every once in a while (a year or so depending on frequency of use) of the OS and all apps. Just back up what you need on a firewire drive (email / bookmarks / keychains / projects / etc...) and reformat that sucka. DO NOT copy apps back onto a clean HD - fresh install them. Start with the OS (naturally), run Software update to get it up to date then install the apps. Run Software Update again afterward to update the Pro Apps.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

i agree with joe. its a half a day of effort but very well spent in my opinion.

I agree completely. I did a fresh install last weekend and everything runs much more smoothly -it's like a shot in the arm for me and my mac's relationship.

Based on experiences with FW Hdrives going down I was paranoid and backed everything up to 2 locations before the clean install -just an idea from the belt-and-braces brigade.

One other thing that happened -when I tried to re-install Flix Standard (from www.on2.com), it told me I had exceeded my quota of installs. I use flix all the time so I was kind of worried but a quick trip to the ON2 website reset my quota and now all is fine.

[flix.on2.com]

James

I agree with everyone about the fresh install, but I go one better. Rather than backup to another drive, I just buy a new drive for fresh install, and use my most recent drive in the second bay of my G5, or one of the Intel bays. That way, if the new stuff is ever a problem the fix is as fast as rebooting on the old drive.

-Vance

Rebooting on the old drive with the problems? No thanks. A new drive is a good idea but I would not depend on an old drive to fall back on. No way.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Humm I see your point Joe. It does work for me tho.

In my case I am doing this because of updates and not problems. Nothing wrong with the old drive, just out of date. My main gig is sports broadcasting. I am editing highlight type things while the game is on the air. If an update has a problem I want to be able to get back to working as quickly as I can. Nothing like an AD counting backwards from 10 to raise the pucker factor of a problem.

Even on stuff I am doing with a longer shelf life, if there is a problem with a project I can go back to a known good state, project, application and OS.

-Vance

This Should work

Delete the file "Final Cut Studio System ID" from /Library/Application
Support/ProApps/ This should cause Final Cut Pro to re-register and ask for
the serial number again.

Shlomo