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philreed
Contributor
Contributor

Clock follies

Scenario: MacBook Pro with OS X 10.4.10, running fine. XP installed into Bootcamp, running fine.

When I first installed XP and got it going, I noticed that coming up in XP-Bootcamp resulted in the clock being set goofy, due to the difference between the handling of the hardware clock in OSX and in XP (OSX expects the hardware clock to be set to UTC, XP expects it to be set to the local time zone). If you boot in XP, the clock is off. Correcting the clock in XP then booting back to OSX results in the clock being off there too.

There's an old hacky registry setting for XP that changes that behavior. It appears to be originally implemented for NT4, and is still in the system. Why they leave stale code lying around like that is a discussion for another day. The registry change still works, more or less, but it's not supported by Microsoft any more.

Enter VMware Fusion. I just fired up Fusion on the Bootcamp partition today, and it seems to be working well. However, with VMTools installed and the "Set guest clock to host clock" option activated, the clock is once again set strangely when I quit Fusion and boot back into Bootcamp.

Is there ANY configuration of clock settings between the three environments (OSX, XP/Bootcamp, XP/Fusion) that will result in the clock being handled appropriately all the time?

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philreed

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Wes_W_
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

If Bootcamp access the hardware clock directly and resets the clock to the local timezone, you'll always have a problem with time settings after booting into Bootcamp. Perhaps you can set the XP timezone to an offset for booting into Bootcamp, or create a batch script to run that adjust your clock for you.

Using OS X and VMware Fusion with XP (in a standard, non-bootcamp, virtual machine)...all the clocks work fine.

If you must boot directly to XP from Bootcamp, I'm not aware of a fix, unless you can repair XP via that NT4 registry hack.

Microsoft is a bone head for trying to set the hardware clocks to a local timezone.

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philreed
Contributor
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Yes, I have to boot into XP via Bootcamp from time to time. The problem seems to be that the registry fix is in effect even when running XP via Fusion, hence the fix works even when it's not needed, which garbles things up when flipping back and forth.

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