How to correct creation date (1976) on hard disk?

There is a way to do this in Terminal - I've tested it on a scratch USB drive and it seems to work. However I am not highly experienced in Unix, and if the 1976 date doesn't pose problems, I probably wouldn't try to change the internal HD with something that "seems to work!"

If you want to risk having to reformat though, we can try it. You will need an additional small utility program called SetFile, which is part of Apple's Developer Tools. Here is a reference page for it:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/SetFile. 1.html

You can get SetFile from the XCode Tools folder on your Tiger Install DVD (run the XcodeTools.mpkg package, and customize -uncheck all but Developer Tools Software). The SetFile utility is also contained in the update package you used to get to 10.4.11 - if you used Software Update there should be a file called "MacOSXUpd10.4.11PPC.pkg" in /Library/Receipts. If you used the 10.4.11 Combo Update and still have it, you can get the SetFile program from there as well.

As I said, it might be best to leave the date alone, but if you want to proceed let me know whether you can get SetFile from Developer Tools or if you want to use a 10.4.11 update package to obtain it.

After a little more experimenting (I like this stuff!), it looks like you can run SetFile directly from the mounted image of the OS X 10.4.11 Combo Update (PPC), which makes things a lot easier.

So if you want to try this, the steps for resetting the creation date on your boot volume to, say, July 19, 2008 at 4PM would be:

1. Download the [Mac OS X 10.4.11 Combo Update (PPC)|http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/apple/macosx_updates/macosx10411com boupdateppc.html] if you haven't already done so.

2. Double-click the .dmg file to mount the image "Mac OS X 10.4.11 Combined Update." Don't run the package - just close the little Finder window that appears.

3. Open Terminal.app in /Applications/Utilities

4. Copy/paste the following directly into the Terminal window (it is all one line):
---------------
sudo /Volumes/Mac\ OS\ X\ 10.4.11\ Combined\ Update/MacOSXUpdCombo10.4.11PPC.pkg/Contents/Resources/SetFile -d "7/19/2008 16:00" /
-------------

5. Hit Return. Enter your password when prompted (it will not echo on the screen), and hit Return again.

6. That's it! If there were no error messages, recheck the creation date of the boot volume in GetInfo.

==========

But again, although this "seems" as if it would work, and the risk "seems" small , I just learned about it, and I don't know enough to vouch for it. So whether it is worth doing is up to you!

Hi,

I looked at the article you listed - it uses the "touch" command which it says does change the creation date. However the manual for "touch" states instead that "The touch utility sets the modification and access times of files to the current time of day." I tried it, and it does not seem to change the creation date of my test volume.

With regard to SetFile-

it's a 'Unix Executable File' that opens with Terminal, so I'm guessing I could just double-click it and then enter the desired date.

No, that won't work - you will just get a description of the parameters that you need to supply. SetFile has no user interface once executed - it is really a command just like other Terminal commands , of the form
Do "this general thing", in "these specific ways", to "that particular target."

So in Terminal, you need a command line with all the instructions included at the beginning, i.e

"path-to-SetFile" (execute the program which sets attributes of files) "-d" (specifically the create-date attribute) "7/19/2008 16:00" (using this particular date) "/" (using this path for the target -in this case "/" means the boot volume.)

I used "sudo" at the beginning because a bootable disk is owned by the system, and you need "root" privileges to modify it in this way.

If you want to try it in the future, you could could still use the method I outlined - mount the Combo Update disk image, copy-paste the single line I gave you into Text-Edit and change the date between the quotes, and then copy-paste the line into Terminal. For a different target disk, don't hit return yet - instead use the delete key to delete the final "/" on the command line, and then drag in the volume icon that you want as the target into the Terminal window. Click inside the Terminal window and hit return. I think this would be easier than trying to construct a command line from the beginning - Unix is case-sensitive, and doesn't like spaces in filenames.

Good luck in any event! 🙂

You need to reformat and reinstall. Norton would not correct the creation date. It would correct a modified date if that was shown as a date prior to the creation date.