Weird time effect...

[Munchkin]

Don't know what else to call it and I don't know for sure if this fits in hardware but here's the deal.

My 4000D had more or less been off for a few years. The last few weeks I've played around with it a lot and it's been on more or less 24/7.

Here's the strange thing. Whenever I turned it off and left it off for more than a few minutes the time was always set back to some date in 2004. This made me believe that the battery was dead.

Now, last night I decided to reformat all partitions so I backed up, reformatted and copied everything back. After this I turned the thing off and left it off. It's been over 12 hours. Strange thing is that when I turned it on now it showed the correct date and time.

I really don't understand how this could be. Obviously the battery isn't dead since this happened but how can a simple reformat suddenly make the battery backed up clock work again?

Not that I'm complaining, rather the opposite, but I can't figure out what was wrong before. Another strange effect that i noticed was that on my second boot partition CGX didn't work properly before. It opened up on a RTG screen but I couldn't see any CGX screenmodes. Now after this reformat that suddenly works as well, I can now see all screenmodes and select between them again.

Anyone that has a good explanation for this?

[Daedalus]

Now, are you really sure it's the correct date and time? Because if the clock doesn't give a coherent time to the OS on loading, the OS will check the date of the system partition and set the clock to that. If there's no system partition, it will be set to 1978... Maybe it's just the same date and the clock itself is 12 hours out? Big fluke if it is, but try set it a few days in the future and see if it keeps time.

The only other thing I can think of is that you've had some time management utility installed that was malfunctioning (DST utility or something), and copying everything off and back has disabled it...

[Munchkin]

I'm quite sure. When I restarted it today it showed the correct time, year and date. I set all of it last night before I started the reformatting.

I know for sure that as late as yesterday afternoon it did the same thing, reverted to old saved time in 2004 after having it turned off for a few hours.

I have/had no such tool in use either. The fact that CGX started working as well after this procedure suggests that something wasn't quite right with the harddrive. I have not changed any settings, the only thing I've done is backup, format and copy back.

I was quite surprised to see the year, date and time correctly when I started it up today. I didn't expect that at all.

[bloodline]

Always used to happen with me, it is just some old software resetting the clock during boot up... Once you formatted the drive you got rid of whatever was resetting the clock.

[Daedalus]

Well, if it's working, don't question it :-) Just leave it alone!

[Munchkin]

That's just the thing, I'm not like that. I don't like it when things happen that I have no idea about why they happened. Just my nature to figure out things, it pains me to have things hanging in the air like that. :p

I'll figure it out someday...


Still, even if it is like suggested some old software causing it it doesn't explain why CGX suddenly started working on my second boot partition... unless it was something there as well blocking the way in some fashion...

[taunusand]

Strange, we always read about dead batteries that has to be removed, but now I read about a working battery :lol:

[Munchkin]

taunusand wrote:
Strange, we always read about dead batteries that has to be removed, but now I read about a working battery :lol:

Well, it's been replaced once.. 10 years ago or so. That's why I more or less was certain it was dead but aparently not!