I'm on Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan, but have a second OS on my hard drive: Mac OS 10.6.8 Snow Leopard. I'm resetting my router and am therefore looking for the MAC hardware addresses of my two systems.
The MAC address from the system I'm currently on (10.11) I've found within the system report and in the internet preferences within the system preferences (menu "Hardware").
Is there a way to find the MAC address (somewhere in the depth of my hard drive) of my second system without rebooting into said system or is it even the same on both systems? Yes, I'm lazy.
Many thanks in advance!
Best Answer
A media access control address (MAC address) of a device is a unique identifier assigned to a network interface controller (NIC) for communications at the data link layer of a network segment. In other words, the MAC is independent of the operating system.
With certain hardware (such as routers), it is possible to assign your own Mac address. This is often referred to as cloning. I do not believe this is possible with macOS. Although, you can assign a your own MAC address to any virtual machines running in VirtualBox.