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Category: Apple

MacBook Pro Data Recovery Boot AnimationIn the course of recovering data for our Apple & Mac Data Recovery Services, we often blog about the various problems and issues we see.

  • Finding Mac Version The Easy Way

    If you want to find out which version of Mac OS X is installed on a drive, but cannot boot into it, there is a plist file that holds the version number.

    The file can be found at:
    Macintosh HD > System > Library > CoreServices > SystemVersion.plist

    Mac OS X System Version
    Mac OS X System Version

     

     

     

    The SystemVersion.plist file should look a bit like the picture below. I have outlined the relevant part in red:

    System Version Plist
    System Version Plist

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    Update.

    Alternatively you could paste the following command into terminal:

    defaults read defaults read /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist | grep "ProductVersion"

    This will show you the version of the currently booted system. You would need to change the first bit if you wanted to find out from another mounted drive.

    The output will be:

        ProductVersion = "10.7.2";

    In my limited testing, this seems to have an error when run from 10.5. It says the file doesn’t exist. I will look into this some more.

  • MacBook Pro Glitching Fix

    Just fixed an annoying problem that started when I upgraded to Lion. When dragging something to the dock from finder, or from a stack to Finder there would be a flash of strange coloured graphics at random points around the screen. It’s gone too fast for me to do a screenshot but I may try to get a small video of it.

    Anyway, the fix is easy and involves turning the dock from 3D to 2D mode.

    The Terminal commands are as follows:

    defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
    killall Dock

    The first command sets the Dock into 2D mode, the second command resets the Dock to allow the changes to be seen.

    Below is the About This Mac screen. It’s an old (Powerbook G4 Style) MacBook Pro, Core 2 Duo.

    Now I just need to find out why it takes so long to boot up.

    MacBook Pro - About This Mac