Hello ladies and gentlemen, Welcome to the first in hopefully a series of articles from me covering older apple hardware service and support matters, these articles are my own and do not contain copyrighted content.My history with Apple goes back well over 23 years ago as a user / owner and 16 years back when I qualified through my college to become a registered Apple Service Engineer supporting a 4 campus college complex with over 2000 macs. Back in the early 2000's our site was filled with every mac going from relics like the Classic, Centris, Powermac 9600 / G3 Beige MT, through to the XServe G4 and XServe RAID, etc. There were also a large quantity of windows PC's but I didn't care about those. Within the time I was based there for all of 3 years before University, I was in charge of the entire apple fleet as no other techs understood the systems well enough, the amount of times systems were offline as someone incorectly imaged an HFS drive, installed software that conflicted or deleted system extensions, or worse, didn't create sufficient client login credentials for OSX Server, that drove me mad. All I will say officially speaking is, since I left for University for a masters degree, staff were trained i apple service installations etc and 6 staff were enrolled in full exams so that they were fully qualified.Enough of that, now it's time to share some knowledge.One of the most frustrating things regarding apple hardware, especially machines like G4's, G5's and intel machines where OSX in particular gets security glitched is when a board loses it's serial ID.
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The Serial Number is a combination of the MAC Address and Part Number. Example: Use the bolded portion of the MAC address (ignore the first six numbers): 001B215CFD4C; Include the manufacturing information: 090AC; Plus, the bolded portion of the Part Number, eliminating the dash) E68785-000. The easiest way to find your Mac’s serial number is from the “About this Mac” information panel. This can be accessed via the Apple menu, as shown below: Once open, click on the grey OS X version string. Clicking on this string will toggle the string showing the OS version, the OS build number, and finally your system’s serial number.
This can be caused by a replacement board or a couple of extremely rare phenominen including board shorts, etc. What happens is the Serial number that's flashed into ROM disappears, this means that security features built in to Mac OS, in particular Mac OSX are blocked.
Why I hear you ask. Well, yes, the rumours are true. Apple employed a technology called BlackBox within the logic boards, basically a ROM chip containing theUnique ID for each machine with a ROM checker and revision checker for that particular board. Due to the way that Mac OS was created unlike windows where you use product keys and online activation, Mac OS looks for the CODED serial ID and UUID to authorise it, that's why even now, MAC OS X becomes free as it's tied to a mac owner via Apple ID and also inspects the Serial ID. Now, Blackbox technology changed but is still used in it's principle method for this reason of security.Now, If your mac shows 'System Serial Number' and not the hardware number it should have, then you're in for an interesting challenge, yes, a rather serious one at that. Look up titles, filenames, SHA1, PN #.
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