UC Berkeley Year 2000 Information Departmental and Personal Computers: Find and Resolve Y2K Problems
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This page was last updated early during the year 2000 and some or all of its content may thus no longer be current or accurate.

Recognizing and Recovering From Y2K Problems During the Year 2000

Your PC's date is set to 1980, 1984, or some other incorrect year Go
Norton Disk Doctor reports "invalid Dates" or "invalid Time Stamps" Go
Your Web browser reports a "certificate authority expired" error Go

Some Y2K problems on personal computers and workstations leave telltale signs that make them fairly easy to identify. Here are some common problems that you might encounter early in the year 2000, with suggestions for how you can resolve them.

Your PC's date is set to 1980, 1984, or some other incorrect year
Description/cause

Some PCs have BIOS chips that do not properly roll over your computer's internal clock Go from the year 1999 to the year 2000. Instead, these PCs' dates will revert to 1980, 1984, or some other incorrect year. Often, this will occur the first time that your PC is restarted or power cycled during the year 2000.

A dead or weak battery - which maintains your computer's date and certain other settings while it is powered off - might also cause this problem.
Recovering from this problem

In nearly all cases, you can resolve this problem by just manually resetting your PC to the correct date via the Windows Date/Time Control Panel, the DOS DATE command Go or some other method.

A very small number of PCs (less than 0.1% of all PCs) with certain 1994-95 era Award BIOSes can't retain dates in the year 2000, and will require a software fix Go.

Finally, you might need to replace a dead or weak battery.

Norton Disk Doctor reports "invalid Dates" or "invalid Time Stamps"
Description/cause

You are using Symantec Corporation's Norton Utilities program on your PC. When you start your PC or run Norton Disk Doctor, you encounter the error message:

Norton Disk Doctor has found the following errors in <Folder name>
...
Entries with invalid Dates
Entries with invalid Time Stamps

Do you wish to fix these errors?

This might be occurring because your PC's date has been incorrectly reset to 1980, 1984, or some other year Go.
Recovering from this problem

Don't allow Norton Disk Doctor to "fix" any such errors until you have verified that your PC's system date is correct.

If necessary, reset your PC to the correct, current date Go.

For more details, including what to do if you've allowed Norton Disk Doctor to "fix" invalid Dates and invalid Time Stamp errors, see:

Your Web browser reports a "certificate authority expired" error
Description/cause

Your Web browser reports a "certificate authority expired" or "security certificate expired" error when connecting to a secure Web site.

This is not a Y2K problem. Rather, digital certificates for certain Certificate Authorities, which "vouch for" many secure Web sites, expire in some Web browsers at midnight on December 31, 1999 Go.

Recovering from this problem


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This site is provided by the campus Year 2000 Departmental Computers and Administrative Equipment Subcommittee at the University of California, Berkeley.

Copyright 1999 by the Regents of the University of California.
Disclaimer: The University assumes no liability if the information on this page is used for other than University purposes.