[X-Unix] Re: Putting Serial # into System Profiler

[William H. Magill]

On 25 Nov, 2004, at 05:53, Peter Dyballa wrote:
> Am 24.11.2004 um 23:26 schrieb 
> x-unix-request at listserver.themacintoshguy.com:
>
>> 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?
>
> The serial number is stored in the OpenBoot PROM (OBP).

This is totally dependent on the particular box. I think it is true for 
all new G4 and G5 machines, but I can't find any sort of confirmation 
on that. Older Apple docs (circa 1999) indicate that there was no 
reliable serial number recorded except that on the outside shipping 
box. My beige G3 (an OF box) does not have the serial number.

Some older Macs stored the serial number in the boot block on the hard 
disk.

> There probably is more than way to access it, the first one being 
> burning, the second a hard reset/PROM reset. The third one would be 
> Forth, the programming language of OBP while your 'in the OBP', having 
> booted while pressing alt-Apple-O-F (OF = Open Firmware). In this 
> state you can list devices, change working directories, set boot 
> paths, list your environment ...
>
> ioreg can retrieve quite a lot of settings from OBP. 'ioreg -l -p 
> IODeviceTree | grep IOPlatformSerialNumber' returns that serial 
> number.
>
> There are a few places with documentation on the OpenBoot PROM, coming 
> from DEC/Digital, adopted by Sun and Apple too. These two companies 
> have some docs around ...

I believe that "OpenBoot PROM" is in fact a Sun-ism; "OpenFirmware" and 
"OpenProm" are the IEEE standard names, which Apple utilizes.
http://www.openfirmware.org/

You can find a number of Apple documents (including the SDK) by 
searching the developer site for "openfirmware" and "openprom".

See also Apple's OF site:
http://bananajr6000.apple.com/
It has all of the Apple OF technotes.

It's not clear to me if the Serial Number is now stored in the PROM, 
but it if really is, then a prom reset should restore it. (CMD-OPT-P-R, 
wait for the second beep.) However, it is in the OpenFirmware as 
"serial-number," and does not show up as an environmental variable.

You can display it from OF by simply typing ".properties."  (It does 
not display via
"nvram -p".)



T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill
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