iBook problem

Hey I have an old iBook that i use only for the internet and listening to music since it cant really do anything else;P

Anyway, my dad had it in work for a few months and when i got it back last night the battery was completely drained, so I charged it full and I started it up. It came on fine but then i got an error message saying that the date was set before march 24, 2001 and this may cause applications to act eratically so i should fix the date in the date and time preferences. The only problem is that the preferences wont open Neither will Safari, iTunes, i Chat, MSN or most other things

Also, the time and battery information and stuff thats usually on the top right of the screen has disappeared

Anyone know what to do?
Thanks in advance

P.S. It's running Mac OSX Panther.

Also I forgot to say that the keys to chnage the volume and the key to eject the disc drive dont work.

Archive and install maybe?

The time and battery things are one and the same - the iBook doesn't have a separate battery (can't remember what it's called) to keep the clock and things running after it's completely and utterly dead, so it resets the clock. Is the battery actually holding charge? Does it turn off when you unplug it?

the battery works fine and its holding charge fine
how do i archive and install ?

Pop in your OS X Disk and boot up holding down C, should boot from the disk. Just make sure you do archive and install, rather than erase and install or you'll lose all your stuff!

Before you do that, have you corrected the date and restarted? Could fix it.

i cant correct the date because system preferences wont open.

Ah yes, I forgot that part.

Hopefully somebody else will turn up with another idea in a minute as well.

skaheadpunk said:

Pop in your OS X Disk and boot up holding down C, should boot from the disk. Just make sure you do archive and install, rather than erase and install or you'll lose all your stuff!

Click to expand...

could that possibly fix the date problem ?