2006 iMac with hidden EFI menu
So around the beginning of January I saw a now archived blog which shows how you can enter the actual EFI menu on a first generation Intel iMac over here: https://web.archive.org/web/20060405170751/http://nak.journalspace.com/?cmd=displaycomments&dcid=407&entryid=407
I decided to find out if it was possible to actually do this on an iMac from Late 2006 which had similar specs to the iMac shown on the above website.
What I did was order a late 2006 iMac (5,1) from Facebook Marketplace for a shocking $45 AUD (which I considered cheap) and that same day, I immediately got to work. I flashed iMac4,1 firmware on my 5,1 which was successful, then I flashed the very first iMac4,1 firmware from Apple’s Firmware Restoration CD 1.7.
Then I booted into the GraphicsConsole.efi file on an external drive as told on the blog and surprise! It works!. Right below is a screenshot of the main menu:
As you can see, it provides key specs of the Mac such as the Core 2 Duo CPU inside, 1GB of RAM and the processor speed. It also shows evaluation elements which means this was only supposed to be shown on 2005 prototype Intel Macs, as Apple moved towards their far more simplified boot manager for their retail devices. Below are more screenshots of the menu:
Here’s the Diagnostic Page
Here’s the Boot Maintenance Manager
This screen is where you choose to boot from a file. The selected option activates Network booting, causing the screen to go grey with the flashing globe.
This is the ACPI configuration settings menu. You could easily sabotage someone’s Mac by changing these settings.
And here is the memory settings, which only gives two major options such as skipping the memory test (which you can’t even do because that’s on the PEI level of the firmware).
