Mandrake 8.0: BIOS problems?
 

Hi,

Whenever I leave my Mandrake 8.0 box running for a while unattended, I come back and my time settings are all off. They revert back to the previous day and a different hour, but the minutes stay the same. I investigated this problem by going into my BIOS and checking the time in there, and it was all messed up.

To try and find out what the problem was, I changed the time back to the correct settings and rebooted. I booted into Mandrake and let it sit for a while. I watched the screen and saw it flicker. When it came back, I saw that the time was wrong. I turned off the power management (thinking that maybe standby was doing this), but no luck. It still does it.

In addition, my LAN card is automatically disconnected from the net, and I have to restart the connection with net_monitor. This is a big pain in the butt!

Are there any ideas as to why this is occouring? What could I do about it? I'm using KDE 2.1.1 Thanks!

-Gordon

if BIOS starts lagging or problems with time get whacky or off.. it sounds to me you need to replace the onboard battery.

Uhm... this is especially strange as the hardware clock is normally only consulted at boot time, once the system is up a software clock is used, hence even if the system time is wrong it shouldn't effect the hardware clock (as accessed in the BIOS) unless something explicitly synchronises them...

cheers

Jamie...

I have seen the screen flicker when using the date command to change the time while using X. Also a clicking sound from monitor.

Maybe it is a bad idea for me to set it while in X.

Are you sure you do not have something running that is setting the time? This is the most probable thing.


:Pengy:

As jharris says, when the system is up and running it uses another clock, the system clock, which is sepatate from the cmos clock used to keep the time when your computer is of.
When linux boots up it reads the cmos clock found on the motherboard and copies the time to the system clock. When shutting down linux writes the current system time to your cmos. This is done to correct your cmos clock which is much less accurate than the system clock.

I have no clue of what in your linux might cause this problem. The symptoms almost sound like some kind of meaningless virus :confused: