I have a legacy system that is running Red Hat Linux 5.4 and the cron daemon will not start. It stopped suddenly, I verified the CMOS time and the system time are correct. I've tried resyncing with timeservers and then disabling time servers. I have not changed any cron jobs or crontab files.

I've restarted the server multiple times.

The error that I keep getting is:

When I try running:

service crond start
This is the result I get;

Starting crond: Jul 20 14:09:45 localhost crond: There is a problem with the time, cron will remain stopped until fixed

What would be the best solution?

That string does not appear in my RH5 crond binary or in any of the standard libraries. Do you have a modified version of crond installed?

In addition to what smallpond wrote:
- Check the Red Hat knowledge base and bug tracker for similar issues?
- Check system and daemon logs for clues?
- Validate your installed packages?
- Update RHEL5 as Update 11 has been released for some time now...
- Find out when the issue started and what changed before?
- Start the cron daemon via a verbose strace and look for clues?