Lightroom/Adobe nightmare

Question

I have run into an unbelievable nightmarish situation with Lightroom and Adobe.
Several months ago, I upgrade to Lightroom 3 and for awhile, all was fine.
Then, a couple of months ago, I began to experience many problems with my computer and finally had to replace the harddrive. I did so and migrated everything over. This solved all the problems that I had been experiencing, but Lightroom had now become a trial version. This did not happen with any of my other programs, including others in the Adobe suite, such as Photoshop, InDesign, Acrobat and so on. Only Lightroom.
I was not concerned. I had the serial number. Unfortunately, when I entered it, nothing happened. Suddenly, I no longer had access to Lightroom, a program that is absolutely vital to my workflow. I had two big projects underway, each 116 pages, one very near to completion and on that project, my photos were all processed and I had no more need for Lightroom. The other, however, was in the early stages and I had thousands - tens of thousands - of images to deal with.
So I called Adobe support and was connected to a support tech in Delhi. He and I then spent over two hours working to solve the problem. He took control of my computer and tried many things, but each time, once we entered the serial #, nothing. Over two hours of this. Finally, he grew frustrated and said I would get a call back the next day at a certain time and the problem would surely be solved.
That callback came - a different tech this time - and we spent over one hour going through much of the same process with the same result - nothing.
He said he was "escalating" my case and wanted to schedule a call back the next day but I had to go out into the field for the next several days, so instead he scheduled the call back for the following week, this past Monday at 11:30 AM.
That call never came. In the afternoon, I again called Adobe. I got an automated message with a promise to call back in about 59 minutes. I took off in my car to do something, planning to be back before that 59 minutes passed, but the call came while I was in the car. The tech knew nothing of my case, but I gave him the case number. He put me on hold for about five minutes, then came back, told me my case was being worked on, that it was being "escalated" and that I would receive a call back within 24 hours.
Given all the time that had past, given the fact that Adobe had a full week to prepare for the promised callback that had never come, I told him 24 hours was not acceptable. I told him Abobe was wasting my time and costing me money in lost production and that I wanted a call back in 45 minutes. After some back and forth, he agreed. He said I would get a call back in 45 minutes.
That call back never came.
Finally, 23 hours and 50 minutes later, I did get a call back. This was late yesterday afternoon. I spent about 20 minutes to a half-hour talking to this tech. I told him that to me the solution seemed painfully simple. As I had bought my product from Adobe, upgraded it through Adobe but that for some reason that no one could figure out, it now would not reactivate, Adobe should just replace it with a brand-new Lightroom.
He said he would "escalate" the case and promised to call me back at 12:30 today. If need be, we would then replace my upgrade with a new version and he would be there to troubleshoot if anything went wrong. He promised that the 12:30 call would bring a solution.
Guess what? He did not call back. Nobody did. Adobe left me hanging.
Finally, I called back. Again, I got an automated message that ended with a commitment to call me back in 19 minutes.
That call eventually came. The tech knew nothing about my case and so took some time to review it. He then said he was passing me on to his supervisor, who he promised would surely have a solution.
I then waited for a good spell listening to horrible music and finally the supervisor came on. He said he had reviewed my case and that the person who would need to help me would be the one whom I had last spoke with yesterday - the one who promised the 12:30 call back that never came. He promised that he would have this person call me back in five minutes and this problem would be solved.
That was an hour-and-a-half ago. The call has not come.
This is awful. What has become of Adobe?
This is inexcusable.
I am in a horrible jam. I have already spent days upon days, weeks over months, editing and rating photos in Lightoom catalogues, all of which are now unavailable to me. I have no way to process CR.2.
I am so frustrated and angry with Adobe.
I think I now have little choice but to purchase Aperture, and start from scratch.
Adobe... I must hold my tongue...

Answer 1

Jeff - first, I must thank you, for you are truly trying to help and you also obviously know what you are talking about.
Now:
Yes, I go through the process as you have described. I get the green arrow both for the upgrade serial and the original serial number, which appears immediately when I enter the upgrade serial number. The finish button becomes active, I click on it and then the dialogue box disappears and nothing further happens. It is as if Lightroom had never shown up on my screen.
I will try your idea of installing Lightroom on another internal drive (I have four internal two TB drives and I also keep three external docks that I move drives in and out of on a regular basis. I go through drives like crazy and have a drawer that is chock full of them).
Before I do, I have a question. If I succeed at installing Lightroom on another drive by using another admin user, will my other applications be available through that user? Or might some of them switch to trial mode?
If it successfully installs and then I switch back to my current ad min user, will the newly installed Lightroom be availalbe to it, or would it switch back to the trial mode?
As to you BTW question, after I did the migration and Lightroom came up as a trial, I was very busy in the final stages of the first project I mentioned and did not want to fool with anything that I did not have to, so I did not try to activate but used it in trial mode into the 30th day. So it worked in trial mode all that time. However, once it failed to activate, I lost the remainder of the 30th day. It would not work in trial mode again. Of course, it is possible that the 30th day timed out during the time that I was trying to activate, in which case the trial would have been available for the full 30 days.
Again, I thank you.