Dear Group:
I recently experienced a problem with my system and I would like to
share it with you.

While I was on the net, my system crashed and I did a manual boot.
"Norton Disk Doctor proceeded to indicate there were errors in the dates
and time stamps. I said OK, fix them. After about 30 seconds of fixing
with more to go, a red flag popped up and I cringed. I stopped the fix
and that's when my problems began. Almost everything on the system had a
1980 date and midnight time. To make the story short, I lost every bit
of information on both of my drives. sigh Loves labor lost.

I would like to know, if possible, why the date and time changed and is
there something I can do next time to prevent the change? I also want to
share this so this won't happen to someone else. My BIOS information is:

Computer ID          FC, Type: AT
BIOS Date            08/02/96
Award BIOS Found     Award Module BIOS v4.51PG
Award ID String      08/02/96-i430VX-2A59GM39C-00
Board/BIOS-Version  (PH5400V R1.02)
OEM                  Mitac
Chip Set             i430VX//Intel TVX

According to a recent news letter I received from Symantec dated
04.06.99, (too late to help me yet informative) they addressed this
issue under the heading "System Date Resetting to 1980 and the Norton
Disk Doctor Invalid File Dates Fix."

They stated that the BIOS on some systems will reset itself to the
default date of 1980 after a system crash.Norton Disk Doctor will run
and detect this faulty date, and offer to correct the file dates rather
than correct the erroneous BIOS date.
"Don't allow the good doctor to make repairs without first checking your
BIOS date settings." The "good Doctor" assumes that the BIOS date is
correct. "If you allow
Disk Doctor to make repairs it will set all of your file dates to 1980
which will necessitate reinstallation of all of your software including
Windows."

"This situation is very rare and affects less than 1% of Norton
Utilities
users." Somehow I thing the percentage is extremely low.

It sounds like a bug in need of a fix to me. Any insight would be
appreciated.

Sincerely,

Frank Suszka
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