[kevs]

After reboot, message comes up saying the clock is set before 2001 and may cause erratic behavior and to check system pref. But check and there is says current date 2005. Has anyone seen this? thanks
10.4.2

[Thade]

Maybe a sign of a dead battery or just a fluke. I've seen it on my old machine. The current date is accurate because your time & date preferences set current info via internet time server.

Jeff

[OreoCookie]

Probably you have enabled the time & date syncing feature via internet. For one reason or another (e. g. after a pram reset or when the battery for your clock is almost empty), the internal clock is reset. Hence the warning. But once the system synced the time with the internet, it resets itself to the current date.

[Millennium]

To expand a little bit on what Thade is saying, the order of events is probably something like this:

• You boot up. The motherboard battery is dead, so the clock resets to the default time.
• The GUI starts up. It notices that your clock is set to a time that it can't possibly be; OSX was first released in 2001 so there's no way it should actually be running on a machine before then. It warns you of this.
• The system-time helper tries to sync your clock to Apple's, and it succeeds. The machine now knows the correct time and date.
• You check the date in Data & Time. It's already been reset, so you don't see anything wrong.

If you want to experiment with this, you can disable all your network devices, power down the machine completely, and then reboot. The system won't be able to sync up with Apple's time server, so you should see the wrong date when you check Date & Time. Alternatively, you could go to Date & Time and tell OSX not to sync the clock automatically, which will keep the system from even trying to sync up.

[angelmb]

and if you guess why 2001 and not another date, it (2001-03-24) is the date Mac OS X 10.0 found its way to the public.

[kevs]

thanks, is my battery low? anyway, I should just let it go for now, correct?

[Detrius]

Originally Posted by kevs

thanks, is my battery low? anyway, I should just let it go for now, correct?

Did it only do it once, or does it do it all the time? You could have a corrupt PMU as well, which could cause all kinds of other weird power related issues. Do a PMU reset ( search Apple's website for PMU reset and whatever machine you have ). After this, the date & time will be reset--fix it. Shutdown the machine and disconnect it from power. Wait about ten seconds or so and boot the machine back up. If you still get the Date & Time error, your backup battery is most likely dead.

iBooks don't have a backup battery, so any time you remove main power and the main battery, this will happen.

[Fusion]

I got this message one time when the battery on my wife's iBook fell out while the machine was asleep. I put it back in, booted up and received this message. Same thing though, when I checked the clock it had the correct date, like it had already synched up to Apple's servers.