Daylight Savings Time 2007 Problems

[Jason Canada]

I have been testing the new daylight savings time patch on our images
and we have seen some strange results.

First, with any time change (spring or fall) we have seen that when we
hard reset (using the reset switch on the box) a system a few minutes
after the time change the clock will change again on reboot. For
example, if we set the system to March 11th, 2007 at 1:59 AM and then
allow the system to jump forward to 3:00 AM and then hard reset the
system the clock will jump to 4:00 AM on the reboot. Once we shutdown
the system with a proper shutdown command things seem to normalize.

Second, the patch seems to have worked great for the March 11th 2007
time change. However, if we set our system clocks November 4th, 2007 at
1:59 AM the clock fails to fall back. Luckily we have 10 months to
figure this one out.

Has anyone seen similar problems?

 

[KM]

Hi Jason,

I should say first I haven't done much testing for the DST 2007 yet. Specifically I didn't test that Embedded QFE from Microsoft for
XPe.

However, I did test the one from XP Pro (on XPe image):
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...BC-FE8F-4BFC-8667-C1D46662B5B7&displaylang=en
(the KB is here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928388)

I basically installed that package on my full blown XPe image.

And it worked great for me. I tested both DST and no DST times (time change on March 11 and November 4) and the time expectedly
jumped by 1 hour when the clock were passing 2am.

So below is my rough guess and how I'd approach the issue debugging..

At the first glance, the XPe QFE (https://microsoft.embeddedoem.com/content.asp?path=/downloads/winxp/qfe/dec06su) I didn't notice
anything suspicious but can't tell for sure until tested. I think for you the easiest way to find out if anything is missing from
that QFE is to install the XP Pro package on the top of your XPe image and see if the second issue you mentioned goes away. If it
does, then I'd repeat the experiment (you can actually do that at first place) with registry monitoring tools like Regmon or RegSnap
(or Inctl5) to see if anything there gets added or modified.
Or just dump the registry branch of [HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Time Zones] key on XP Pro and your XPe image
and compare.

With regards to the first issue you're experiencing. Well, I'd say graceful shutdown is always a better option
Are you running image with EWF or not? (sounded like not) If EWF is not there, nothing will promise you are not losing some data
when you suddenly power off that machine. You can certainly trying to flush the disk cache and etc and it may help but still, no
100% assurance. For DST changes system may have to commit some data in asynchronous mode or even at shutdown time. You can
relatively easy verify that if you make an attempt to compare registry hive content offline for the images with DST time changed
occurred where one image was gracefully shutdown, another one - was not. Certainly there will be some other entries different but I
think it should be obvious which entries are of interest to you.
With EWF, though. You are going to face another problem - famous issue of DST with EWF on (search NG archive for tips on this
issue).