Need to transfer Adobe Acrobat to a new computer but lost your serial number? How do you find Adobe Acrobat Pro serial number before formatting your hard drive? If you somehow lost your serial number, there may be a way to find it as long as Adobe Acrobat is still installed.
Product Key Finder is a utility for retrieving lost serial numbers from Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Acrobat Pro, Adobe Acrobat X, Adobe Acrobat XI. In just a few simple steps, you can find the serial number for your copy of Adobe Acrobat on your computer.
How to Find Your Lost Adobe Acrobat Serial Number?
Obtaining the serial number from an installed Adobe Acrobat is legal. But if you’ve formatting your hard drive or done a fresh Windows installation, you’ll lose your serial number forever. In that situation, you need to purchase a new copy of Adobe Acrobat.
I know that Keychain holds my WiFi and other passwords, but I'm curious to know where my Adobe and Microsoft product keys for things like CS6 and Office live. I'm using OS X Mavericks.
There's no generic OS X place for storing product keys. It is up to each individual software supplier to decide where they want to store the products. Usually it is done in ordinary files stored in the file system.
For Microsoft they reside in /Library/Preferences/ under a name such as com.microsoft.office.licensing.plist.
Similarly for Adobe I think they are in /Library/Application Support/Adobe/<product>/<product> Registration
As a user you don't really need to know where it is stored as the programs handle product key management themselves.
For adobe CS5, look in /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Adobe PCD/cache/cache.db: this is a sqlite database (you can open it with sqlite3).
Then run the query:
This should give you a 24-numbers encrypted serial number. You must then decrypt it (the 'SoftKey Revealer' freeware for Windows has a decryption tool, you can also run it using wine on Linux and possibly Mac OS).
If you re-install, you might need to enter your trial serial key at installation, and then enter your product key at the activation step. For the trial serial, see the other answer from mspasov.
Another way to decrypt the serial number, as opposed to downloading freeware tainted by evil payloads (at least one download site for 'Softkey Revealer' has taint) is to run a simple JavaScript function (copied from elsewhere, but tested and works):
You can copy this to the Chrome or Firefox debugger console, then type:
Adobe registration info (for most recent Adobe CC products) is stored at /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Adobe PCD/. There is a SQLite file, containing the keys. Here is a partial dump: