There's some website, can't find the bookmark now, that maps those last three characters to various Mac models.
At least on my system, the last three characters of the serial number was stored in two places in the Fsys section. What was changed to handle the "personal" information? The 'Fsys' section seems particularly mangled compared to the clean, less-than 64 byte, entry my system has. My question relates to the firmware dump from the Macmini2,1 posted above. My experience indicates that there are 3-4 key 2k byte sections that relate to identity (offsets from 'xxd'):Ġ1d8000: Labeled 'Fsys' and clearly where the serial number plus some other info is stored (this section has an integer value at the far end of the 2k).Ġ1f3800: Seems to have some other versioning information in addition to the firmware revision number itself. With these I can interactively get the 2MiB flash contents of a Macmini1,1, and view the combined hex/ascii dump using 'xxd' (with the potential to modify that dump with 'vi' and reassemble using 'xxd -r').
My tools have been 'flashrom' (), DirectHW () and 'xxd' (part of the ViM package and already on my Mac OS X 10.6.8 system). Hi! I've been looking at this independently for a month or so, now (trying to find where the board-id comes from, for instance). 2 or 3 blocks of several bytes which are "FF" in the original firmware.ĭo you think we can modify the dumped MM2.1. If you give a closer look there are not so many differences between the dumped firmware and the original version from Apple (I did this with the 08 and my dump). If some brave soul wants to try it out, I can edit the updater file and scripts, and someone can try it out using the uploaded MacMini2,1 file posted previously. In any case, there's no way to tell if this would work correctly, and it it doesn't the result will be a bricked Mac Mini. My guess is that the firmware installer extracts this data from the machine and then inserts it into the new firmware image, and then flashes it, or the image is flashed and then this data is written. It appears that Macs are using a portion of the firmware image to store hardcoded data like the SN and UUID as well as NVRAM parameters like boot volume, audio level, etc. The files differ by hundreds and hundreds of bytes. I've begun googling about this and here is what I found :
08 () "Mac mini EFI Firmware Update 1.1"Īnother suggestion : is it possible to dump a entire firmware from a real mac ?
MM11.004B.00B () "Apple Intel firmware restore 1.1" I spend hours looking on the internet for this firmware and I think we won't find it there.
Title: Re: Mac Mini Firmware Upgrade Utility Needed (help request). So the question is this - is my dream of 3Gb and easy Lion installs pie-in-the-sky or could someone (hint, hint MacEFIRom) knock me up a Mac Mini Firmware updater or give more details on exactly which firmware string is modified by the Mac Pro Firmware Upgrade Utility so I can attempt to knock up my own firmware hack? The MacMini2,1 also has the exact same boot ROM & SMC version listed on the Apple site as my machine:.
Secondly I want to change the model identifier from 'Mac-F4208EC8' (Macmini1,1) to 'Macmini2,1' (Mac-F4208EAA) so I can install Lion without having to mess with the ist files to get the installer to work.īoth machines use the exact same GMA950 chipset, the only difference is the Macmini1,1 used Yonah 32bit CPU's whereas the Macmini2,1 used Merom 64bit CPU's. Firstly I want to get around the 2Gb max memory limitation of my machine (to utilise 3Gb out of a 4Gb matched pair).Ģ. There are two problems that I'd like to solve with a similar hack to the recent Mac Pro Firmware Upgrade Utility.ġ. I've got a first gen intel Mac Mini (Macmini1,1) that I've upgraded with an ES C2D 2.16 (before you could actually buy C2D's - gotta love engineering sample CPU's :-)