Viewing system info before intial setup

[danochamp]

I'm going to buy a used iMac today, the previous owner has just performed a clean install of Mavericks, meaning I'll have to go through the initial setup of the mac before I can use it.

I want to make sure it has all the advertised hardware however and we're meeting in a public place so I won't have internet access, is there any way to access the system info before going through the initial setup?

Thanks for any help.

 

[hfg]

Make a bootable external drive of your own and boot it up from that.

 

[DeltaMac]

You don't need to bring a bootable drive, Mavericks already has two.
Boot to the Recovery partition. You don't need to set up the system to boot to THAT.
Just power up, holding Command-R
You can check the hardware from the System Information.