Old motherboard, braindead bios.
Hi.
I have installed Debian on an older system (Cyrix 6x86, Tyan Tomcat
430HX) whose BIOS is brain dead. It will not accept a year greater than
1999. Unfortunately, there is not a BIOS update past the one I have
(v2.22, 11/96) [ Rant: Actually, there is an update which fixes a ton
of stuff and adds lots of features but it's for boards shipped with 3.x
and 4.x only. I find it shameful of Tyan that I have a relatively
modern flashable motherboard that is not Y2K compliant and abandoned.
Bastards. If anyone knows if I can upgrade this BIOS, please let me
know. It's model number S1562, Tomcat I, bought around 6/96. ]
Anyway, I thought I was going to have to invent some kind of startup
script to fudge the year. Luckily, I discovered the --badyear switch of
hwclock, so I added it to the appropriate lines in
/etc/init.d/hwclock.sh, and this works alright. The problem is that
until hwclock is run from its link in /etc/rcS.d/, the year is 1998. I
get this message about "modules.conf is more recent than modules.dep"
since modprobe runs before the year is set. So, I tried moving the
hwclock link from S50 to S11 (right after checkroot, before modutils at
S20) but now it seems that my timezone is not set correctly when hwclock
runs. Arggh.
My questions:
1. What's the earliest I can run hwclock during the boot process?
2. Is there a way to do the year correction earlier, i.e. is there a way
to have lilo or syslinux or one of those loaders do it before the kernel
even starts? All it would have to do is look at the year and add 4 to
it (I think.)
3. When I installed, I had the year set to 99 since that was the latest
I could set it. I know it doesn't really matter but I'd kind of like to
fix all those dates to be correct... Can anyone suggest a 'find' script
that would search for dates within a small window (like 5/27/99 through
5/28/99, when I did the install) and add three to the year? Is there a
better way?
Thanks,
Brian
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