Re: Boot error

["Kevin A. Foss" <kfoss@mint.net>]

On Thu, Jun 10, 1999 at 07:55:58AM -0700, Lazar Fleysher wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I have noticed that sometimes I get this boot error:
> 
> mktime() failed unexpectedly (rc -1). Aborting.
> 
> Could someone tell what and how dengerous it is?

This is probably from hwclock, it will say this if your bios returns 
what appears to be an invalid time.  (Until quite recently hwclock 
was rather strict about where the century byte should be -- more 
strict than the bios manufacturers.)  Try running hwclock and see
what happens.

I've gotten this error on every original IBM machine I've tried -- 
both PS/2s and Valuepoints.  I'm not sure why you would get this
only 'sometimes' however, it should really be everytime.

If it is hwclock (and I'm almost sure it is) -- the latest versions 
of util-linux in unstable have a fixed version of hwclock.  

The danger is minimal, an improperly patched hwclock could potentially 
screw up your BIOS checksum, but the Debian packaged versions
shouldn't.

-Kevin
-- 
Kevin A. Foss ---- kfoss@mint.net