[SOLVED] Different times in Debian and Windows

TristanDee · 12-07-2009, 11:14 PM

I was so excited about coming back to using Debian after quite a long time, and especially about a successful dual-boot set-up with Win7. But, you know...here I am with this problem.

I'm sure I had set the correct time zone during installation of Debian and at one stage the installer asked if other OSes on my machine had UTC set. Now, both Win7 and Debian had set the same correct time zone, but when I logged in to Debian it gave an incorrect time, which I set corrected.

After a reboot, however, the start-up process showed a horrifying error, saying the last boot time logged in the system was in the future! It suggested running fsck without -a or -p options while the file system is mounted read-only. I had to run fsck twice before I could logged in to my Debian system again without any problem. But when I logged in to Win7 it was showing an incorrect time, which I had to change manually. And guess what! - This changed the time in Debian to a future time seven hours ahead!

Is there a way I could set the same time in both my OSes?

My time zone is for Dhaka, Bangladesh (UTC +6 with DST, which actually makes it UTC +7).

jim_p · 12-08-2009, 12:42 AM

Debian, like all other unix OSes, thinks that the time inside bios is in GMT, so it adds your time difference from GMT time to show you the current time for your location, aka local time

Windows on the other hand thinks that the bios clock is on local time and it simply does nothing.

To fix this, open your /etc/default/rcS and change the line "UTC=yes" to "UTC=no"

TristanDee · 12-08-2009, 12:47 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jim_p

Debian, like all other unix OSes, thinks that the time inside bios is in GMT,

Hello jim, so, why should Debian think so?

EDIT: Thanks for the solution, I'll check it shortly.

TristanDee · 12-08-2009, 02:09 AM

Thanks Jim, although I had to manually change the system time, reboot and do fsck twice again, and then use

Code:

hwclock --systohc

to set the corrected system time to hardware clock. Now both my systems have the same time.