Weird: During bootup, I must enter input at grub menu to boot. hwclock related?
 

I've installed RHEL 5.8 the same way before many times and never had an issue like this. In this case, I installed RHEL 5.8 on a server with hardware from 2006-2007 which I had not installed on before and now I am running into a problem.

After I ran the installer and rebooted, it stayed at the GRUB screen "Booting Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server (2.6.18-308.el5) in 4 seconds...". The screen doesn't change, the "4 seconds" never counts down. See attached screenshot. I've waited 5 minutes or so and it just stays here until I hit a key to enter the grub boot menu and choose the line to boot. Once I get into the OS all is fine.

Here's why I think this problem is hwclock related:

#1 My motherboard BIOS time is set to GMT. When I'm in RHEL and check the time (I'm in PST timezone), it's off by the amount of time I waited at that grub screen.

#2 Here's another clue it's hwclock related. When reset the system, when it stops the services during the shutdown procedure, I get an error during the "Syncing hardware clock to system time Timed out waiting for time change." See attached screenshot.


Any ideas what's going on and how I should fix this?

I did try timeout=0 and that fixed the problem as it doesn't wait for input, however that's not a solution for me as there could come a time I do need to edit something in the grub boot menu.

I fixed the problem. It was due to the battery on the motherboard! I thought initially it could be that but since it kept the time, I thought it was a RHEL issue with the hardware config given all the software issues. I replaced the battery with a new one and everything works now.