System clock going crazy

DDevil · n00b Joined: 02 Oct 2003 Posts: 50 Location: Earth

I've got a really strange problem here. I set my hardware clock in the BIOS to the correct time, and now my system clock is going crazy _and_ it is changing the hardware clock. Whenever I adjust the time in the BIOS, as soon as I booted up Linux it sets the time to a random time/date. For example July, 19 1984 or August 2, 2002. Now when I look up the time in the BIOS, the hardware clock was also set to this random date/time.

I know that syncing my system time with a time server would solve this problem, but actually I'm more interested in knowing whats going on.

What is it? I cannot explain that. Spock would say, it's illogical.

Thanks for clues.

(Gentoo is the only OS; Mainboard is a Asus A7N8X Dlx.)
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jasm · Posted: Sat Oct 04, 2003 7:09 pm Post subject:

Hi there,

Had a similar problem. My clock was drifting by something like 20 minutes a day. I didn't have this problem when working with other Linux distros and that other OS.

In my case, the problem was created by "hwclock". This tool is called by the startup/shutdown scripts to load the system clock from the BIOS and store it again when shutting down the system.

So far so good but, if you read the man page of hwclock, you'll find out that it also tries to compensate for the drift that the BIOS clock is having. The information that is related to this drift is stored in /etc/adjtime. In my case, it turned out that the content of that file was just plain wrong. The situation got resolved by removing it. (The startup scripts wil recreate it with default content upon reboot).

TheCoop · Posted: Sat Oct 04, 2003 7:13 pm Post subject:

gentoo is known to cause system clock problems, something to do with syncing system clock to hardware clock - could be workgin in reverse to what it is meant to do.

theres a guide to setting up ntp on the forums somewhere
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DDevil · n00b Joined: 02 Oct 2003 Posts: 50 Location: Earth

Ok, I think it's working. I removed /etc/adjtime and rebootet the computer - and it actually 'holds' the correct time.

Thanks for your help.

I think I'll install chrony or something now...

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"Utilising drugs to pay for secret wars around the world, drugs are now your global policy now you police the globe"