System clock jumps ahead seven hours

Question

System clock jumps ahead seven hours

I have a problem with my system. I have encountered this with every revision of 10.6. My system will randomly jump ahead seven hours, without changing its time zone. The zone stays the same, but the clock shows the wrong time. It just happened. It went from 5pm to midnight.

I can fix this by manually adjusting the time in the System Preferences, but this does not fix my iCal, which is permanently adjusted to the wrong time. If I adjust the times in iCal, they'll be seven hours EARLY if I reinstall the system (which is so far the only way I've found to deal with this problem).

This is driving me batty, and it's made all the worse by the fact that I seem to be the ONLY person to whom this is happening!

Does anyone have ANY idea of what's going on and how to fix it?

Mac mini 2009, Mac OS X (10.6.4), 320gb/4gb

Posted on Oct 7, 2010 5:24 PM

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Answer 1

Barney-15E

Level 10

113,046 points

Oct 7, 2010 6:20 PM in response to Carla Anderson

Are you booting into Windows via Bootcamp? I know there was an issue with the two system clocks, but I don't know if it has been fixed.

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Answer 2

Oct 7, 2010 8:01 PM in response to Carla Anderson

Sounds like your CMOS clock is using local time when your Mac/PC/Windows thinks it's using GMT, or the other way around. I know for Windows 7 I had to set a registry key so it would stop doing that.

Also, if it happens eventually, after some time, it means that something is "setting the time" automatically, like ntp or what some call "internet time" so you might wanna figure out what is doing this and check if it's configured properly.

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Answer 3

Oct 7, 2010 8:31 PM in response to Barney-15E

Nope, no Boot Camp goings-on here at the moment (though I'm planning on installing Windows 7 at some point in the near future).

In the end I wound up reinstalling the OS and now things look fine. It's quite bizarre.

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Answer 4

Oct 7, 2010 8:33 PM in response to François J. Perreault

The only thing which should be doing that is the Date & Time pref pane. I don't have anything else installed which would be trying to set the system time. :/

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Answer 5

Oct 8, 2010 10:22 AM in response to Carla Anderson

After changing the NTS to a different time zone, I tried to launch the terminal to force the system to resync the time, only to be told "You are not authorised to run this application. The Administrator has set your shell to an illegal value." I opened Disk Utility and repaired the permissions and got the same error, so I figured I'd just restart.

BIG mistake. My system would not boot. It showed the grey boot screen, then went to the blue screen with the spinner on it. It was just stuck there in a loop. In the end I reinstalled the OS over the old install, and this has corrected the issue. So…I guess this is solved. It's happened to me several times in the past, and I've a feeling it'll happen again in the future. I just wish I could figure out WHY, and why I seem to be the only person experiencing this issue.

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