OS X Odds & Ends: Date & Time bug follow-up; Long file name follow-up; FireWire drive startup; more

Date & Time bug: a follow-up Marty Snyder has now heard from Apple regarding the Date & Time reset problem recently covered on MacFixIt. Apple confirms that the problem is likely linked to the use of the Adaptec SCSI driver for OS X. "He told me that they will be posting a notice about the problem, and the probable solution, soon."

Error copying files with long file names to OS 9: a follow-up Thomas Koons found the same problem with copying long-named files from OS X to OS 9 as we reported here yesterday. He adds: "Yes, you must make sure the name conforms to the length that the OS 9 Mac is running but some files make this very hard! One example is a text clipping from Internet Explorer in OS X. The name under Classic OS shows the file extension as being .textclipping. That is a very long extension which eats up all the room for a name.

Work-around for failure to startup from a FireWire drive Dik Gregory found that, after updating to Mac OS X 10.1, his external FireWire hard drive with Mac OS 9.1.1 installed, appeared in the Startup Disk System Preference. In Mac OS X 10.0.x, it did not. "However, selecting it had no effect. My system still booted from the OS X 10.1 system on my Cube's internal drive. To actually boot from the FireWire drive, I needed to first boot from 9.2.1 on my internal drive and then select the FireWire drive from the Startup Disk control panel." [Note: we wonder whether holding down the Option key at startup might also work, as Apple advises for dealing with problems starting up from USB drives in OS X.]

Update: Dan Malloy had a similar problem, except he got a kernel panic when trying to startup from his FireWire drive in OS X and an "illegal instruction" crash when trying to start in OS 9. He was finally able to boot in OS 9 by starting up with extensions off. After that, he found he could startup from the FireWire drive if he used the Option key at startup method.

Image Capture glitch? Ira Victor found that if he downloaded images from his Nikon CoolPix 995 when booted from Mac OS 9.1.1, all worked fine. However, "if I download the images in 10.1 using Image Capture, they download fine, thumbnails and all, but the image will not display in Photoshop. I just got off the phone with Apple and was told that Image Capture is doing what it's supposed to do, the problem lies with Photoshop, a Classic app, not working the way it should with OS X. I still don't understand this though, because the ones downloaded under 9.2.1 work fine. Maybe using Image Capture changes the file somehow to work better with OS X? As a further test I downloaded a couple of photos straight off the Web into 10.1 and they open fine with a double-click. So do all of the images I've created or scanned in the past. The only ones that don't are the ones acquired through Image Capture in 10.1."

Ars Technica review of OS X 10.1 and file name extensions We took a closer look at the Ars Technica review of Mac OS X 10.1 (first cited here yesterday). Among other things, we see that it joins the chorus of experts who claim that OS X's file name extension metadata "solution" needs some serious re-thinking (see also our previous item).