Clock problems with dual boot mac system:- 10.6 and 10.8

bootclock

I have a dual boot mac pro 3,1 : one hard drive with Snow Leopard (10.6.8) and one with Mountain Lion (10.8.?). When I boot up with Mountain Lion it unfailingly resets the clock to about 4 am. This results in my editing software 'Lightworks' not responding to my attempts to access it. Could anyone help with this problem? It is driving me nuts!

Best Answer

The fact that it resets the clock is usually an indication that the PRAM battery needs replacing. Without the PRAM battery keeping things running right, the clock can get messed up plus there can be all sorts of other wierdness that can be difficult to track down. With a machine of this age, it is a good idea to replace it anyway, and it seems pretty cheap to do so:

http://www.newertech.com/products/pram_3v.php

As a short term work around, make sure that the "System Preferences" -> "Date & Time" settings are properly adjusted with your proper time zone and the "Set date and time automatically" boxes selected. This should help with the clock, but fixing the battery issue will make sure nothing else is bad.

After replacing the battery, resetting the PRAM would be a good idea.

OS X Mountain Lion: Reset your computer’s PRAM http://support.apple.com/kb/ph11243

http://thenextweb.com/lifehacks/2010/12/04/how-when-why-to-reset-the-pram-smc-on-your-mac/

http://www.macexpertguide.com/2012/11/18/reset-pram-mac-troubleshooting/

http://macs.about.com/od/usingyourmac/qt/Reset-Pram.htm

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MacOS – Troubleshooting MacBook Air boot issues

You can try the following steps :

Backup all your data
Perform a clean install from the Apple-provided USB drive (boot from the drive, choose your language, then go in the utilities -> Disk Utility. There, you can re-create a new partition in order to eliminate drive partitionning problems).
quit the utility and re-install SL

If nothing helps, that probably means that the mac encountered a hardware problem.

Perhaps you could post here the error messages you encounter in single user mode, that could help understand the problem.

MacBook Air dual boot Lion+10.6

Yes - it's trivial to partition and takes a negligible amount of space away from the drive for the second partition's overhead.

Since that model is supported on Snow Leopard - the installer will run happily to install to any partition that's larger than 6G.

Since the mac stores the default boot volume in NVRAM - there's really no delay in booting unless you hold the option key to get the boot manager and ignore the stored default.

Lion and BootCamp can be a little fussy, but most times you can just resize your current OS to make room for the new one, make a new partition and run the installer.

Windows doesn't like more than 3 partitions on the drive and the BootCamp assistant doesn't want to deal with two mac partitions, so you have to know enough about Disk Utility to do that setup by hand. For SL + Lion - you'll end up with two large partitions and a small Recovery HD at the end of the drive

Here's what one of my macs with a copy of Lion and Lion server looks like. You'll have one less Recovery HD with Snow Leopard.

mac:~ mike$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *160.0 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS mac                     94.3 GB    disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3
   4:                  Apple_HFS server                  64.2 GB    disk0s4
   5:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s5

Best Answer

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MacOS – Troubleshooting MacBook Air boot issues

MacBook Air dual boot Lion+10.6

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