Does Fedora mess up the clock for Windows?

[Jacques B.]

On 5/26/06, Lee Maschmeyer <lee_maschmeyer at wayne.edu> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I have a dual boot system with FC5 and Windows XP. On FC5 I run ntpd with
> the default config files. The drift file varies widely, from -0.4 or so to
> as much as -60 or 100 or more. Generally the longer Fedora is up the smaller
> the number, though it's always negative.
>
> But Windows is losing time hand over fist, maybe a couple minutes or more in
> a 3-hour Windows session. I use an old program (AtomTime95) to correct the
> Windows clock periodically but it doesn't do any permanent good.
>
> I had the same kind of thing happen with Fedora 4. It went away when I
> installed Fedora 5 until I activated ntpd.
>
> According to /var/log/messages Fedora has to set the clock back about a
> second or so every time I boot it, but nowhere near the gargantuan
> misalignment of Windows.
>
> Does anybody have any idea how to make these two guys live happily together
> sharing the clock? Yes, Fedora does use local time - at least, that's the
> way I installed it..
>
> Thanks much,
>
> --
> Lee Maschmeyer
> <lee_maschmeyer at wayne.edu>
>
> "Be kind to your fur-bearing friends,
> For a skunk may be somebody's brother."
>      --Fred Allen
>
>
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>
Is the BIOS time changing?  By that I mean that as I understand it,
Windows (and Fedora I would expect)  will read the time from the BIOS
on bootup, but that's it.  Unless you are synchronizing it as you are
currently doing, the BIOS time will not change even if Windows time
drifts.  Try turning off synchronization and letting Windows go.
After the time has gone wacky do a reboot and see if the clock is ok
again (assuming that the BIOS time is keeping ok and Windows would
read the accurate time on bootup).  I may be totally wrong on that but
that was my understand on how that works.

That won't correct your problem, but at least confirm that the BIOS is
either keeping time or not, thereby eliminating or including that as
the problem.  A second or so of drifting is certainly not what I would
consider alarming (nor do you from what I gather).  What is happening
on the Linux side appears to be normal.  So the problem would appear
to be with the Windows OS.  Have you installed any applications lately
(on the Windows side).  If you Google windows clock drift, you will
find some who identified their MoBo as the problem (had to flash it),
others identified a program that they had installed (by uninstalling
it and clock drift disappearing).  If you have installed something
recently (since the problem arose), if you can try uninstalling it (as
irrelevant as the program may seem).

Beyond that, I can offer no other advice.

Jacques B.