Bug #43745: Ubuntu corrupts real time clock on some dell laptops

[Francisco Borges]

Hello,

: On Tue, Nov 07, 2006 at 03:23PM +0100, Carsten wrote:

> Bug #43745: Ubuntu corrupts real time clock on some dell laptops

> It would be really nice, if somebody could tell me if this bug is still
> existing in Ubuntu 6.10. Has somebody experience with Ubuntu 6.10 on a
> Dell Inspirion 6000 or 6400 Laptop?

Short answer:

The bug *IS* present on Ubuntu 6.10, aka Edgy.

If you read the messages at the bug repport, you will notice that quite
a few people have had the problem with Edgy.

It does not, however bite very often. YMMV.

[...]

I suffered from this bug while using Dapper. What makes it particularly
annoying is that, if your laptop gets stuck at boot, to remove the coin
battery from a Inspirion 6400, you have to remove the keyboard.

The trick is that if your clock gets damaged, and the BIOS is not
performing througout checks on boot, you will still be able to boot. Or
at least that's how I had it.

Some people have reported that XP would be able to repair the BIOS, so
rebooting WindowsXP could help (if you kept it - I didn't).

[...]

On the other hand, the bug doens't occur to everyone. I've ran Dapper
for months, got it once; and have been running Edgy for ~2 months now,
and haven't got it (yet).

The closest to a good guess of what causes of this bug so far seem to be
this post:
https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.15/+bug/43745/comments/60

HTH, cheers,
-- 
Francisco