Aperture won't open anymore.

Question

This is going to be a long one. I don't know what I did wrong.
I have a trial version of aperture. I don't know if that means that it will cease to work after a period of time or what. I'm not proud to say that I downloaded it from a torrent site. Okay, shoot me! Maybe it's okay because it was a trial version.
So here is what is going on. Yesterday the CF card from my camera wouldn't load into my computer, and I put it back into the camera and there was nothing on it. Very strange as when I was taking the shots I could see them on my LCD on the camera.
So for all intents and purposes it is empty. I downloaded Untrasher to try and recover the pics on the card. In the download process of the Untrasher, I had to put a copy of it onto an external hard drive. Which I did. And again I'm not sure of any of this because I don't know what I'm doing.
Untrasher recovered some pics on the CF card, but they were ones that had been purposely deleted when aperture asked if I wanted to delete and eject the card from previous download. So Untrasher works pretty good as it recorvered some old stuff. It didn't however recover the stuff I wanted.
So now it is taking up 16 gigs on my external drive. Maybe it is not taking up that space because it is a copy and there is nothing on there, but I JUST DON'T KNOW, AS I DON'T KNOW WHAT I'M DOING. I'm not yelling, just emphasizing.
Now I cannot put the "Digicam .dmg" which is what is on my external drive, in the trash. I get an error message saying an error occurred and I can't continue. Error # 1407. What ever that is.
And now Aperture won't open either. I just get the spinning beach ball. I found the original download folder for aperture and re-installed it and the new one won't open either. Have these expired? Does anyone have any idea what is going on?
And how can I put this Digicam .dmg in the trash and get rid of it. It just won't go.
Thank you for any help.

Answer 1

There's a good chance that the version of Aperture you downloaded isn't legit.  Same thing for the Digicam clone .dmg you downloaded.  These could be filled with programs that could damage your HD and files.
Fist things first - since you're running Snow Leopard, the App Store version of Aperture won't work as it will only work on either Lion or Mountain Lion.  You'll need to decide if you want to upgrade to ML first.  You're alternative is to BUY the retail version of Aperture from someplace like Amazon.
My gut level feeling is that the software you downloaded may have damaged your OS.  My personal recommendation would be to do a clean install of Snow Leopard (after you manually copy all of your data to an external drive that doesn't have any of the crap you downloaded on it).
If you need a good data rescue program, Data Rescue 3 is probably the best.  Yes, it's expensive, but it's saved my butt multiple times (even recovering data from a WinDoze drive).
One more thing...quit downloading stuff from torrent sites!  Buy it legit!