[X-Unix] Putting Serial # into System Profiler

[Phillip Burk]

On Nov 24, 2004, at 6:07 PM, Phillip Burk wrote:

> On Nov 24, 2004, at 5:25 PM, Kirk McElhearn wrote:
>
>> On 11/24/04 11:03 PM, "Marley Graham" <mgraham at aquaflo.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Apple System Profiler displays the serial number in only about half 
>>> of
>>> our company computers (mostly iMacs). How would one go about entering
>>> serial numbers into the Apple System Profiler for the rest of them?
>>
>> I never thought you could "enter" them - I always thought they were
>> hard-wired into something on the motherboard. It seems more 
>> surprising that
>> some of them _don't_ show serial numbers. I'd ask Apple.
>
> I was under the impression that the serial number was stored on the 
> hard drive.  When the drive is initialized (at least in older Macs, 
> not sure how old) the serial number is erased.  I remember hearing 
> about a classic application that would put the serial number back.  
> I'll see if I can dredge up some more information for you.

I know it's poor form to reply to your own message but I did some 
nosing around at apple's developer site and found a couple of 
interesting technotes:

http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn1103.html
"Uniquely Identifying a Mac OS Computer" (dated 1998)

and somewhat interesting:
http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn2001.html
Running files from a hard drive in Open Firmware

Neither identify the exact process of accessing said serial number, 
however.  There HAS to be a method of access.  The data is being read 
from somewhere.  If we can read from it chances are it's writable.