[Bug 43745] Re: Ubuntu corrupts real time clock on some dell laptops

[Klaus Reimer]

If you can access the CMOS battery then it's safe to try Dapper again.
If it corrupts the BIOS again then you can simply remove the CMOS
battery, wait some time to let the BIOS reset and it will boot again.
The Dell Latitude D820 has this battery under the cover of the memory
slots. So you just have to remove one screw and this cover and then you
can pull out the battery.

But after Dapper was released (with 2.6.15-23 kernel) it got very quite
here. Maybe the problem is solved. Or maybe all affected people have
switched to an other laptop. Like me :-)

If someone has a Dell Latitude D820 (where recovering from the problem
is quite easy because of the accessible CMOS battery) it would be very
nice if he tries the current kernel and start it with kernel option
"init=/sbin/reboot". If it survives this extreme-rebooting for some
hours then I think we can be pretty sure the problem is solved. My D820
died after an hour or so and I could reproduce this several times while
playing with kernel options like disabling acpi.

By the way: Currently I'm using a Dell Latitude D810 and I have
installed  Dapper when the Final was released. Up to now no problems.
But I'm not doing an extreme reboot on this machine because the battery
is not as easily accessible as the one of the D820. If the problem
occurs I will first see it in the grub boot menu when the count down is
no longer working. If this happens I will boot Windows, I heard this
also fixes the problem and I hope this really works. But maybe the D810
is not affacted at all by this bug (if it's still present).

-- 
Ubuntu corrupts real time clock on some dell laptops
https://launchpad.net/bugs/43745