Clock and date resetting to 1969??

Originally posted by Ed Spruiell
isn't it obvious, apple just wants to transport us back to the good old days when think different was long hair and peace. '69 - the summer of love:D

groooovy man!

Well Ed I can see by your profile we were both there, unlike a lot of posters here in the fori :) Imagine what it would be like now, if we had computers then.
 
we did, and we played pong on them:D

seriously, i'm not sure i would have paid any attention. too much else was going on. the world was a very different place. not really a better place, but very different than now.

well, the music was better.:)

'truckin', i got my chips cashed in
truckin', just like the doodah man...."

I can hear the young ones muttering to themselves about now -
"d*mned old farts - wasting bandwidth with this junk"
 
Its not only DPs!!!

This is happening on my 400MHZ iMac Summer 2000.
I know for sure that the Battery aint the problem since someone posted it. At work I rounded up 3 batteries to test once I goto the office sometime.
I set up network time before I read this because I figured it would fix the problem. And it did. :)
 
Wolf is right, it isn't a MP problem ! More like a G4 tower AGP - OS X something! I noticed that the menu bar clock was always a GMT 24hr clock when the problem occurred. One would expect to use the Date-Time panel to set a 24hr clock, but instead the International Panel is used to set a 24 hr (military time).
 
I have had the same problem on a 2001 iBook (dual usb). It may have happened a couple of times, but not recently. I never did figure out what was going on.
 
The first thing I would suggest to do before buying and installing a new battery is to reset your PRAM. To do this, restart the computer and before the grey screen comes up you have to be holding down Command-Option-P-R simultaneously. Continue holding these down until you hear the startup chime 3 times total, then let go. For better instructions on how to do this and information on what's actually stored in the parameter RAM, go to http://kbase.info.apple.com and search for article number 2238.

If this doesn't remedy the clock resetting, then try resetting your Power Management Unit (PMU). To do this, you actually have to physically push a button located near the internal battery on the logic board. Follow the instructions on Apples Knowledge Base in article number 95037. They have links to diagrams of the logic board of most G4's, so you should have no problem locating this button. Read the instructions in this article carefully. Doing this wrong could damage your computer and could cause the battery life to go from 5 years to about 2 days if the PMU isn't reset properly.

As a last resort if these two things don't correct the time resetting intermittently, reset Open Firmware. To do this, restart the computer and hold down Command-Option-O-F during the startup chime. A white screen should come up with a bunch of jibberish about the version of Open Firmware you have installed. From here, (all lowercase, no spaces, no quotes) type "reset-all" and hit return. It will restart your computer and reset Open Firmware settings to their default.

None of these steps will damage any data on your hard drive or cause any damage to the computer itself. The most it will do is reset your date and time and reset other settings outlined in the article I mentioned about resetting PRAM.

It could be a file corrupted on your hard drive, so you could also try running fsck from single user mode in OS X. Restart the computer holding down Command-S, and when it finishes loading and gets to the point where you can type in a command, type "fsck -y" (no quotes, all lowercase) and if it finds any errors and has to modify your file system, run it again until it doesn't find any errors. When it reports "Volume appears to be ok", then type "reboot" and hit return to startup OS X normally.

If none of these things work, then yeah, you should go buy a new battery : ]

Good luck.
 
Oh yeah.. and you could also try deleting com.apple.MenuBarClock.plist from your preferences folder in your home folder as well. Although I really doubt this would correct the problem, give it a try. Who knows, right? : ]
 
I read something on MacInTouch that said putting you machine to sleep for 5 minutes will correct the reset-to-1969 issue.

Sounds odd, but I thought I'd mention it...
 
Strangely enough, I had a problem that was not all that different from yours. After the last time change I reset my clock in OS X. The next time I restarted into 9.2 the time was back to the original setting. No problem, I just reset the time and when on with what I was working on. Restarted into OS X, and there it was an hour off again! This happen 5 times. Finally I restarted into 9.0.4 (default install of original OS for the system that I have on my utilities partition for emergencies) and reset the time there. THAT fixed it.

Odds are that it was originally the battery in your case, but now you're stuck in the same loop I was in. I'm not sure what you can do, if I didn't have that third operating system on mine, I would still be off by an hour today. Maybe starting off the original install disk for your system (or a version of 9 before 9.2.1) would help in resetting your clock.
 
I've been having EXACTLY the same problem with my machine. A G4 powerbook with a deffective battery which has been deteriorating over time... Wonder why this date specifically...
 
It's just a date. You choose one that's definitely in the past. Apropos: You've revived a _very_ old thread. But I guess your problem's solved?
 
yeah... I hope I have. the computer seems to have other problems with slowdown and freezing up on occasion. I do often circle around the lower end of a gigabyte which I hear isnt such a great idea. I'm farely new to macs so i'm unfamiliar with the diagnostics programs. Regardless... my battery now simply has a great big "X" on it instead of a percentile rating, so I guess today was really it's last gasp...
 
Yep, your battery seems dead, then. I'd try taking it out, leaving it for a day or two and then put it in again, just to see whether it comes back alive. But if it's been deteriorating for so long, it might well just be dead. Replacements from newertech or fastmac should help. :)

As for the low disk space: Yeah, that _really_ makes a change in performance. Keep 2-3 GB free and it's much better already. There's some percentage rule floating around, but I'd simply keep as _much_ free as possible.
 
I have a dozen or so MacPro and PowerMacs in a domain environment, working from an Xserve. When an individual system has this issue while working on a server-based file, the file gets tagged with the date on the server. It's a battery issue on the workstation. The date seems to be an arbitrary one chosen at an early stage in Mac development, because I've seen this issue back in the beginning of (UNIX) OS X.

This is due to OS X's UNIX underpinnings. In UNIX systems, the time is internally represented as seconds elapsed since the stroke of midnight, 00:00 GMT, January 1st, 1970. To the nerds, this is known as the "UNIX epoch." If this counter gets reset to zero or somehow becomes negative, it's 1969 all over again as far as your computer knows.

To UNIX-based systems, they have difficulty dealing with any time before the epoch.

"This message indicates that the Time Of Day (TOD) clock reads zero, so its time is the beginning of the UNIX epoch: midnight 31 December 1969. On a brand-new system, the manufacturer might have neglected to initialize the system clock. On older systems it is more likely that the rechargeable battery has run out and requires replacement."

Has everyone forgotten about MacOS defaulting under similar circumstances to 1904? :D
 
Hi Sprale, good info but the thread is a bit ancient...
Not from 1904 though :D I have some files that I recovered from some old appleshare that I didn't bother to correct the date afterwards.
 
Giaguara,

sprale meant Mac OS "Classic"...

I know this is pre-history for a lot of OS X users, but Mac OS did in-fact revert to 1904 when the battery died... Not to 1970 as our shiny "new" OS X 'nix does.
 
Yup, TWB is right. Whenever the PRAM battery would die on the Macs, Classic Mac OS would revert back to the year 1904.
 
Well - I never run queries to see which precise OS those files had been once hosted in.
Probably whatever was the current when there were some Newton developer files... :)
 
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