date modified changed to apr 1 1976 / Norton not working

Hi Tim;

Oh! YES! I have heard of cases where Norton caused so much damage to the directories that nothing could be salvaged from the disks. Basically all that could be done was completely erase the disks and start over again. So in that sense you were lucky.

Allan

Hi Fumiaki,

April 1, 1976 is the day Apple started itself life as a company, and I think more recent Macs all reset to this date in the event of a system reset instead of 1904 or 1970 as in the IBM tradition.

Interestingly, my hard drive has a creation date of April 1, 1976, but I don't recall the system clock ever going wrong. I think resetting PRAM might have caused the date error. However, in Sarah's case it might just because there was a total power loss. Try keeping the computer connected to some kinds of power source at all times and see if it still happens.

Hi Saxphile,

An invalid formatting pattern caused by a third-party application (e.g., an Unicode scripting) could contribute to not comply with the International Components for Unicode libraries that Mac OS X 10.4 uses with " NSDateFormatter" for instance. There is the difference in the behavior of formatters between Mac OS X 10.4 onwards and the previous versions. You may find "Locale Concept" in ADC or Formatting Dates and Times Overview for more information.

"Data Formatting Programming Guide for Cocoa" also describes; for example, a date format string of "%b %d %Y" would yield strings such as "Mar 15 1994" for Mac OS X 10.0 to 10.3... But not for Mac OS X 10.4 and greater.

In the Original Message (Posted Aug 31, 05 11:26 am), Sara wrote "... reset to "apr 1, 1976." So, I figured out this should have implied an invalid date formatting.

Hi Fumiaki,

Okay, that makes sense. Do you have any suggestion on how I can modify the hard drive creation date then? Thanks.

Probably the simplest way to fix your problem is to reinstall tiger. You may have unknowingly corrupted your current installation because Norton Utilities does not support Tiger's new disk structure. The best bet would be to perform a clean install, if that's not feasible then just do an archive and install (I think that's the one that keeps all your preferences, etc.) and hope for the best.

If you check with the Symantec web site, you will find that Symantec has made a "strategic decision" to not update Norton Utilities to support Tiger. I sent their customer service a feedback e-mail telling them that they should really consider supporting the Mac community. If you like Norton, then I would advise you to send in your feelings to Symantec at: http://www.symantec.com/feedback/ and let them know how you feel. I think if enough mac users make it known that their product would be purchased, they might change their minds.

At this point, the only Tiger disk utilitye is MicroMat TechTool Pro 4.0.x. They claim to be Tiger certified. I've run 4.0.2 and it's worked just fine. If you like to have a disk utility suite, MicroMat has an exchange program where you can upgrade for about 57 bucks. The good thing about TechTools is that it tests all hardware aspects of your computer, but then so does the Apple hardware disk.

I never used Norton. That stuff is evil.

I have run TTP 4.0.3 on my Tiger installation, and it didn't find any significant problems. I'm just asking because the wrong date annoys me. Thanks for the reply tho.

Hi Saxphile, I thought you did not have the issue.

You wrote that you have run TTP 4.0.3 on your Tiger installation. The version 4.0.3 is not compatible with Tiger. It can cause unexpected problems if you use it.

In a similar example, here is TTD 3.0.3 case: Mac OS X 10.4: Don't use Tech Tool Deluxe 3.0.3's Volume Structure repair