Determine which OS was installed on non-bootable HDD?

[komatsu]

If you have a HDD on which OS X was installed.

This disk is readable via USB enclosure

BUT, is not bootable. How do you find out was version OS was installed?

 

[prisstratton]

For the drive in question, browse to: /System/Library/CoreServices and look for the SystemVersion.plist. That should tell you what you want.

 

[komatsu]

cannot find coreservices under
/system/library/

 

[CoastalOR]

The information from prisstratton is correct.
I have it:

 

[prisstratton]

You stated the path so I am assuming that you are looking at the correct /library folder and not the one under the username.

If it is not there then that is most strange as this is common to all Mac versions as it contains (as the name implies) all of the core services for the operating system.

One other thing you can look at would be the version of Safari that is on the system. If you browse to the /Applications folder, right-click on the Safari.app and select to show package contents. Expand the Contents and in the listing that opens up look for a version.plist, in there you will see the version of Safari that was being run on the system. This should correspond to a unique OS version, with the exception of 10.10, 10.11 and 10.12.

Please see here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari_version_history

Hope it helps.

 

[komatsu]

ok, as a sanity check, I just checked on the host Mac system and found the file immediately.

But on the problematic disk (which is attached via USB enclosure)

I can find the Library folder. It lists contents in alphabetical order and starts with:

Caches
Frameworks
Graphics
Image Capture
Input Methods
Java
...
...
WidgetResources
etc.

But not a sign of "coreservices"!

Folders like "Accessibility" and "Accounts" and "Address Book Plugins" also seem to be missing.

Hoping someone here can shed some light on it!

 

[Nermal]

I think this may explain why it's not bootable