Photoshop CS2 and other CS2 applications not launching, Disk Repair does not work: Remove "Legal" folder(s)

If you are having problems launching Adobe Photoshop CS2 or other Adobe CS2 applications, the culprit may be the "Legal" folders which are located within the various application-housing folders (e.g. Photoshop CS2).

As reported by MacFixIt reader Eugene Norris, you may receive an "Illegal Name" error when attempting to repair your startup disk using Apple's Disk Utility (located in Applications/Utilities) if you are affected by this problem.

Here is the relevant output from Disk Utility:

• Verify and Repair disk "Macintosh HD"
• Checking HFS Plus volume.
• Checking Extents Overflow file.
• Checking Catalog file.
• Illegal name
• Checking multi-linked files.
• Checking Catalog hierarchy.
• Checking Extended Attributes file.
• Checking volume bitmap.
• Checking volume information.
• Repairing volume.
• The volume Macintosh HD could not be repaired.

This issue can generally be resolved by deleting the folders named "Legal" or "Legal.localized" within the Photoshop CS2 folder and other CS2 application folders.

You should then be able to run a "Disk Repair" operation in Disk Utility successfully and successfully launch the previously problematic applications.

Feedback? Late-breakers@macfixit.com.

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