Synchronize the time between Windows XP and Linux on the same PC

[Jozefa]

Hello everyone, I have a time issue on my computer issue and don’t know what is the cause for it. I have installed Windows XP on C drive and Linux on D drive. The problem is both the OS show different system time. I don’t know which time is correct and which is different. Correct time is very important for a server, and is more important in a Linux server since there are a lot of logs that's based by time. I want to synchronize the time so that both the OS can run in sync with each other and there will be no further problem.

[Ekpah]

The issue of time in the Linux system is old. It’s annoying but I think you can set the correct time for it. The issue arises because both systems have different ways of setting time. XP uses its own record of time while Linux uses BIOS clock and writes it back at shut down. Due to this the daylight savings skews the clocks by 1 hour as XP accounts a change which is recorded by Bios and Linux due to its daylight saving again auto-compensates it. Set the NTP protocol to sync with world time servers. In Linux there is “ntpd” for the ntp server. The ntpd (Network Time Protocol daemon) is an operating system daemon program that maintains the system time in synchronization with time servers.

[Aleksandra]

Thank you for replying; yes I think the problem is with Linux server. I started ntpd to sync the time with the outside server but the time is still not sync with real time after I started ntpd. Also I found that the ntpd installed is not able to sync to outside server, it still syncs with the Bios server only. Also, the system time is slow, it takes more than one second to count 1 second. There are also problems related to VM hardware's clock settings.

[Wadee]

Have you checked the Bios time through? See which it doesn’t correlate with and then it would narrow down your search. Maybe it’s also the problem with the Linux version installed, you should try to uninstall the Linux and try another one. In 2.4 kernel the clock rate is set to 100HZ and on compiling time the kernel clock is set to 1000HZ, thus cause the timer in guest OS slower than host OS. So, I hope I solved your problem, good luck with it.