Re: Why? mktime() failed unexpectedly (rc -1). Aborting.

[David Teague <dbt@elentari.cs.wcu.edu>]

On Fri, 4 Feb 2000, Kevin A. Foss wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 04, 2000 at 02:14:24PM -0500, David Teague wrote:
> > 
> > My system is an OLD (circa 1990)  486/66 with ISA motherboard and
> > 64K Cache, 32 MB RAM, and 4 Gig IDE disk.
> [...]
> > gandalf# /sbin/hwclock -w
> > mktime() failed unexpectedly (rc -1).  Aborting.
> 
> You didn't mention the version of hwclock/util-linux you were using,
> but older (slink-era) versions will fail on some CMOS because of where
> the century byte is stored.  I know I used to get exactly this error
> when I first tried to get hwclock to work on a PS/2, for example. 

Hi Kevin

The machine is quite old, still has an ISA bus, circa 1993, running
Linux 2.0. Ihe hwclock version is ... lesseee

# hwclock --show
mktime() failed unexpectedly (rc -1).  Aborting.
# hwclock --version
hwclock 2.1/util-linux 2.6

OK? This didn't occur before the millenium, and may be similar to  
your situation. I HOPE you know a fix. If now, I will put another
MB in it.

--David
David Teague, dbt@cs.wcu.edu
Debian GNU/Linux Because software support is free, timely,
                 useful, technically accurate, and friendly.
                 (I'm hoping this is all of the above!)