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I got in this machine having software issues. There is no separate partition with Disk Utilities or system reinstall on it, no Mavericks Recovery Disk. This leads me to believe the machines' hard drive has been reformatted and a system cloned onto it rather than having a factory installed system. Is there a way I can tell when the system was put on or the hard drive reformatted?
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Once upon a time. . . Apple provided total system uptime information - I think that ended with the last PowerPC... you could try this, type ‘last reboot’ in the Terminal. This will provide you with the dates and times of the last few reboots the machine has gone through.
An example:
YourMac:~user$ last reboot
reboot ~ Tue Sep 22 12:52
reboot ~ Sun Aug 30 23:17
reboot ~ Sat Aug 29 01:12
reboot ~ Fri Aug 28 22:07
wtmp begins Fri Aug 28 22:07
This can be extremely helpful when troubleshooting, or even just for finding out how often a Mac gets booted, and is a nice command to use in addition to uptime (to check your Macs uptime, simply type ‘uptime’ in the Terminal) .
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Great tip!! Thanks! I have to deal with this sort of issues sometimes and this helps a lot!
Past 24 Hours: 1
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Past 30 Days: 3
All Time: 142
3 Comments
FWIW over on Apple Discussions;; there has been occasional chatter/reports of "new" machines with evidence of having been previously extensively well used;;. I believe Apple has mad good in these situations.
by originalmachead
Can you give me a link on this, I can't find it?
by mayer
Took me a while but here's one report- other's may have been expunged.
by originalmachead