[ubuntu-uk] Fsck forced on boot up due to date problems after update

Sat Oct 6 09:11:31 BST 2007

Hi Rob,

> I've been trying to install Ubuntu 7.04 on my dad's Thinkpad R50e 
> notebook this evening with not much luck.

Snip...

> I then rebooted again, and during the reboot the machine complained 
> about not having a disk check for about 49,710 days.  It ran through the 
> disk check and rebooted, it then on the second reboot said exactly the 
> same thing.

It isn't the battery - I don't know what it is but it's much nastier
than a dead battery :-(

Doing some simple maths :-

2 ^ 32 = 4294967296
MAXINT = 4294967296 - 1 = 4294967295
4294967295 / 86400 = 49710.2696181

this is unlikely to be a battery problem.  It looks as if some routine
is not reading the date correctly and it is returning either 0 or MAXINT.
For those that haven't clicked, 4294967295 is biggest number that can be
represented in a 32 bit word and 86400 is the number of seconds in a day.
Standard UTC uses the same 32 bits, that's why we have to worry about 2038
(1970 + 49000 days).

Quite what the actual problem is, I don't know but I wouldn't be looking
at changing batteries, I'd suspect some hardware incompatibility.

Some numbers just ring funny :-)

TTFN

D
ubuntu/uk-2007-10-06.tx                        ubuntu-uk rob at esdelle.co.uk
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