Every time I reboot my date gets messed up. Also, when loading there are some issues with hwclock. It takes forever to load. I tried setting hwclock equal to sysclock, but failed:

root@sledgehammer:/home/kosmonaft# date -u 10202339
Thu Oct 20 23:39:00 UTC 2005
root@sledgehammer:/home/kosmonaft# hwclock --systohc
Hangup





Why does it say "Hangup?" Would could be a problem?

I honestly don't know about the "Hangup" response, I literally just learned of the hwclock command yesterday, however, having the time be screwy after reboot is a tell-tale sign of a dead/dying mobo battery. Forgive me if I talking beneath you, but this is how the computer keeps it date (along with a few other settings). Oversimplified, it's all stored in a RAM-like chip that gets the power to function off of a little 3v battery on your motherboard.
If the motherboard battery gets low on juice and can't quite put out enough power for the chip to keep its settings, then the settings will start to slip, such as your HW date setting. If you crack open your chassis (WARNING: This may void a warranty of some sort) you should be able to see a little round battery (like what would be in a watch) in plain view. Replace that and reset your settings and chances are your HW clock will be good. Best of luck

-Tomaczar

I am having this same problem with hwclock also on Archlinux but instead of hangup I am getting a different error that I will have to post at a later date.
I just remembered that there is also a command "clock" that I think maybe useable to set the hardware clock.

you may want to check to see if you have
CONFIG_RTC
set in the kernel...

from the kernel help

CONFIG_RTC:

If you say Y here and create a character special file /dev/rtc with
major number 10 and minor number 135 using mknod ("man mknod"), you
will get access to the real time clock (or hardware clock) built
into your computer.

I know I ran into a problem with this, different than yours, but involving RTC when setting up VMware.
When I tried a `hwclock --debug` it told me that /dev/rtc was not available. I compiled it in and now hwclock works fine.

If you go this route, CONFIG_RTC is under 'character devices' in the kernel config.

hth