Ticket Options

Question Profile

Question Details

TICKET ARCHIVE -> Strange dates

Mister Fisher - Jul 31, 2007 - 11:34 pm

Hi

I run an imac. The one just before they built in the little camera.

My machine was running weirdly a few weeks ago. It kind of ran a greyish tone over the whole screen with a warning. Same sort of symptoms that caused me to have to get a new mother board on it a couple of years ago.

Anyway, I ran YASU over it, and haven't had those problems since. However, I noticed that some files (about half) now carry dates in the 1970's!

Should I be concerned about this. And is there anything I can do to fix the problem?

Thanks for your help.

christine

Serenak - Aug 1, 2007 - 4:00 pm

Hello Christine

thanks for using MacOSX.com and I hope I will be able to assist you today.

First things first - the grey screen with all the different languages on it and the instruction to restart is what is known as a "Kernel Panic" - this is when something very deep in the core of the OS blows a gasket and the core of the OS (the Kernel) cannot continue properly and its inbuilt mechanisms "panic"

Usually this is very rare and unless it happens with any regularity is not particularly something to get overly concerned about - if you installed any new software or hardware it sometimes indicates an incompatability or other problem but sometimes it does "just happen" - as I say if it is just the once I would not get sweaty over it...

After it happens it is a good idea to give the system a check over with Disk Utility or one of the other tools such as OnyX, Cocktail, Yasu, Xupport, MacHelpMate, etc. to make sure that any detrius is tidied up and your disk structures etc are not compromised.

As for the Dates... well files have their dates stored when they are created and also the modification/last opened dates are added when these functions are performed. If the data storing this is damaged I believe the OS reverts to the earliest date available to it... in the case of OS X this seems to be 1970. (The old (Classic) Mac OS used to have a starting date of 1954 for no reason I can discern - is it Steve Jobs' or Woz's birth year perhaps?)

Why the OS X base date is 1970 I also have no idea - perhaps I should Google for it!

Anyway (as I understand it) the Mac OS always calculated time and date by measuring the number of seconds elapsed since the base date - hence the total irrelevance of the "Millennium Bug" issue to the Mac OS, it just didn't store or calculate dates that way... (Perhaps the base dates are nice round numbers of years before the launch year of the OS? 54-84, 70-00??? Who knows, SJ might but I don't I am just guessing )

As to fixing it I cannot say - you could open the files try a save as... that might change the creation date to the day you do it - but unless you do a lot of searching for files by creation date it is probably not worth the bother!

Overall I would not be overly concerned unless such events occur on anything but the most rare occasions - if they do that might indicate a problem in RAM or elsewhere - since you say it has not reoccurred I would be inclined to forget about it and consider the date issue a mere annoyance (just "one of them things that happen sometimes" as it were). If you have a recent backup you could check that to see if the dates are more sensible and restore the misdated files from that - but many (though not all) backup tools put the creation date as the date of the backup on the files - still, better than 1970 though I guess!

Hope that helps - if you need further help or advice come back to me - if not let me know if I can close the ticket as resolved, it will expire in 3 days either way but it is nice to know when a "customer" is happy to close the question.

Once again thanks for coming to Mac OS X Com - if you have more questions don't hesitate to ask - it is what we are here for

Mister Fisher - Aug 1, 2007 - 6:48 pm

Hi Serenak

Thank you for that response. I have had a look at my backup, and the 1970s dates are there also. All the dates on files prior to 2005 are now 01/01/1970. The times they were supposedly created vary, but are all between about 10 and 11.45 am. Weird eh. I would like to solve this problem, as it is very important for me in my work to know which files are the oldest.

regards

Christine

Serenak - Aug 1, 2007 - 7:21 pm

OK - it would seem that your last backup was probably after the kernel panic occurred - hence all the dates from the Mac have been copied to the backup.

Do you have older backups? If you do, is it worth considering restoring from just a bit before the problem happened?

If you don't you have gone beyond my skill to fix things... dealing with the data attached to files is outside my field of skill or experience. As such I will reopen this ticket in case another tech can assist you more

Mister Fisher - Aug 1, 2007 - 8:04 pm

Hi Serenak

Thanks for getting back so quickly. Unfortunately, I only have the one source of back up, and it overwrites. Thankk you for your work.

Regards

Christine

TechSupport - Aug 4, 2007 - 8:10 pm

We apologize for not being able to resolve the issue you asked of us. It is the absolute worst case scenario for us to do this. In our review of why this happens, it generally is related to either the particular issue being addressed or frequently, incomplete or incorrect information provided. We hope by moving your request to the public forums that you will be able to get a solution without leaving you empty handed.

Your ticket has been closed with our support team. Your request has just been posted to Mac OS X System & Mac Software and is available for your viewing at:

http://macosx.com/forums/showthread.php?t=295014

Again, thank you for using Macosx.com. We hope you will consider using us again in the future.