System Profiler Content File Directory Location?

Question

Hello,
I recently changed out my microprocessor in my PowerBook G3 because my old one was not working properly. All works fine now as it is smoothly running 10.4.11. However, I look in system profiler and the serial number has changed to the new microprocessor and does not match the sticker on the bottom on the machine. I managed to modify the "About This Mac" and "Login Window" serial number just fine, but I am stumped regarding system profiler. I did research and found that in 10.5, you can manually input the serial by finding a "SMBIOS" type file architecture in the extensions folder of System>Library. My question is:
Where can I find the system files that give System Profiler its information. or Where can I find the equivalent in 10.4 to 10.5's SMBIOS system files.I appreciate any advice. Please indicate the entire file directory so I can easily find the location of the files I need to modify. Have a nice day.

Answer 1

I suspect that System Profiler gets the serial number either by an internal call to the I/O registry which in turn has gotten it from the logic board firmware, or else directly from the firmware itself. If either of these mechanisms is correct, then there are NO files that carry the serial number, and therefore I think there is probably nothing you can change. This may be incorrect, but so far I've seen no evidence of a datafile that has this information.
By way of background, here is my understanding. Hopefully I will be corrected if I am wrong:
A file is a particular type of data structure, a collection of bytes assembled by the operating system in a specific way. Files usually reside on physical storage devices such as disk drives, and persist even after the computer is turned off. A user with sufficient privileges can generally access the information stored in a file.
There are, however, other types of OS data structures in the "kernel," below the level of the user interface. These structures are not files - it is not that they are "hidden files" or "system files" - they are not files at all. These data structures exist in a protected space that users cannot alter.
ioreg -l | grep IOPlatformSerialNumber | awk '{ print $4 }'
I have no idea exactly "where" this piece of information is coming from, meaning the serial number that appears. It would be greatly appreciated if you could help me track down exactly where on the system the terminal command here is pulling this info from. It clearly gets it from some place, but it just may not be something we can see on the system as an object.
According to the link I posted earlier, the ioreg terminal command directly displays (but cannot alter) the I/O registry. This data structure is not a file, and does not exist in the filesystem that you access via the GUI or via Terminal filesystem commands. Even worse, the link said:
the Registry is not stored on disk or archived between boots. Instead, it is built at each system boot and resides in memory
What this means is that the I/O Registry resides only in RAM - it is completely destroyed when you turn off the computer, and gets rebuilt when you start back up. And again, it is not a file.
That's why I said "This doesn't sound promising"!
there has to be a way to override the "connection" between the dynamic database itself and how it obtains information from it.
If System Profiler.app does either read the I/O registry or read the firmware directly, then this instruction may be hardcoded in the app itself. I don't know this, but if so then I don't think there is any way to get it to look "somewhere else."
Good luck, but I think this project is going to be "The Impossible Dream"