MacOS – Find My Stolen Mini Mac After Installing New Clean Mac OS X Installation

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My Mac Mini was stolen from my office and I think it was stolen by my colleague. They are all software engineers and I think the thief will install a fresh version of macOS on the stolen Mac Mini.

My question is , can I see my Mac's location even after the thief installs a fresh clean macOS onto my stolen Mac ?

I know Find My Mac information is saved in NVRAM and the thief can erase it without booting the whole Mac by some shortcut keys.

Is the serial number of the machine paired with The Find My Mac function at Apple? If yes, can I find it even after a clean macOS installation?

Best Answer

I bought an iMac from a colleague - he wiped it completely and it was in the power up install process choose language.

Then as I continued the normal install it stopped as it thought it was stolen...

The serial number is checked against Apple ID’s and as it was still listed against my colleagues Apple ID it refused to continue...

Once my colleague removed it from his device list for his Apple ID all was then fine as I added it to mine.

So it may not work for them even if they do a fresh install until you remove that serial number from your Apple ID - at least that was my experience.

Related Solutions

Mac Mini Won’t boot with a PC keyboard

(reposting my answer from your Stack Overflow question in case you don't check that one)

If you have Apple's Boot Camp utility installed in the Windows installation, you should be able to choose the startup volume from its' control panel. Insert your OS X install disc, choose that as your startup volume, and reboot.

Mac – How to find your stolen mac on a network using the MAC address/Serial number

If they do come back to the same network and you just happen to be on and looking.

From the command line.

    arp -an

This will show you the IP and MAC addresses of any hosts active on the network at that time.

    $arp -an

    ? (10.0.1.1) at e4:ce:8f:68:85:c8 on en1 ifscope [ethernet]
    ? (10.0.1.13) at 0:19:7e:b0:37:ff on en1 ifscope [ethernet]
    ? (10.0.1.20) at 64:b9:e8:2b:ab:97 on en1 ifscope [ethernet]
    ? (10.0.1.28) at d8:30:62:76:ab:a0 on en1 ifscope [ethernet]
    ? (10.0.1.255) at ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff on en1 ifscope [ethernet]

This will at least tell you if your computer is back on the network. I doubt they would go through the trouble of spoofing the MAC address.

Did you have Remote login turned on? If so and it shows on the network, you could login to your computer. This opens up more options.

Such as:

You could SSH into your computer.

Once in you could run something like this.

    while :  ; do sudo osascript -e "set Volume 10" && say here i am && sleep 30 ; done &

Adjust "here i am" to what ever you want your Mac to say at full volume. I put a sleep 30 in to keep them from just powering it off right away and give you time to find them. It would probably take them a few times to figure out that it was the Mac talking. I'd scope out the Macs in the area before running it so I'd know where to look first.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Mac Mini Won’t boot with a PC keyboard

Mac – How to find your stolen mac on a network using the MAC address/Serial number

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