Find Your Adobe Acrobat Serial Number
On our network, we have quite a few computers that have Adobe Acrobat Standard installed on them. Unfortunately, we don’t know which ones match what serial numbers. So I set out to find out how.
First, you would think you could find it in the registry. This may have been possible with older versions, but with 9.0+ (and possibly lower, I just haven’t checked), it is not saved in the registry.
There is a software product called Recover Keys that will do this for you, but it needs to be purchased and their demo will not show the entire key. This program will even search the whole network for you, but at a much higher cost. So I set out to find out HOW this program found the serial number. Using ProcMon, I discovered that it searched all over the registry, then it started to search Adobe folders. It came across this file:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Adobe\Adobe PCD\cache\cache.db
omit the (x86) for 32-bit
It turns out that this file is a SQLite database. Using an SQLite browser, sure enough, there was my serial number. Here is how to find the serial:
| 1 | SELECT value FROM domain_data WHERE key = 'LineCU 4'; |
It should spit out your serial number. Using these two steps, it should be possible to write a program that finds the cache.db folder on the computer then reads the value out of. I will be investigating doing this on our network programmaticly.
I checked this against Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro, and it was the same. However, on Adobe Acrobat 8 Standard, the key is different. Here it is:
| 1 | SELECT value FROM domain_data WHERE key = 'EPIC_SERIAL'; |
I hope this helps you. I may be designing an application that you can point at a computer name and it returns the serial. I’ll post it up here if I do.
– See more at: http://www.electronerdz.com/2012/07/find-your-adobe-acrobat-serial-number/#sthash.D9QIoYnw.dpuf
http://portableapps.com/apps/development/sqlite_database_browser_portable