Setting system time in WinPE

[MTNMN51]

Can anyone help me? I just recently started using Windows PE 2005 in order to automate hardware configuration on the front end of our ADS deployment process. We previously used DOS boot floppies to set the time, configure the RAID settings, and to set the boot order. However, HP has stopped support for the DOS utilities in the Smartstart Scripting Toolkit. So, I am trying to replace the functionality that we had with the DOS utilities with the utilities that HP provides for use with WinPE.

Setting the time is critical before booting the ADS Deployment Agent. It uses Kerberos authentication, so the image will never deploy if the time is not close to that of the ADS controller. My problem is that when I set the time in WinPE using net time \\servername /set /y it correctly sets the time within the WinPE session. However, when I reboot, I can see that the clock has not been reset. I don't understand why it would be different under WinPE.

Does anyone know how to reset the system clock permanently from WinPE? Thanks in advance for any help that you can provide.

[cluberti]

Moving to more appropriate forum - hopefully someone here familiar with this can assist.

[Jazkal]

These are two seperate settings:

1) BIOS Time

2) WinPE Time (which is based on BIOS Time +/- )

Setting WinPE Time will not hold over to the next reboot. You need to use the HP tools (not sure which one, been a while since I messed with it) to set the BIOS Time.

[MTNMN51]

As a matter of fact, I did RTFM. ;-D

I read the HP Toolkit Users Guide as well as doing numerous searches. However, there is no utility that I could find that allows setting the BIOS time from WinPE. I find it odd that I can change the BIOS time from DOS or any version of Windows using the "net time" command, but it is disabled in WinPE. I really need to be able to synchronize my BIOS time from a Windows PE session, so hopefully someone knows a way to do it natively, or knows of a utility that can do it.

After doing some additional searches, I just found this post on TechNet:

Matt Davis -- MSFT (Moderator):
Q: WinPe Changes: Thank you very much. And what are the limitations? Is it true that for example the net time command like net time /set does not work anymore because of the new limits? Net time works fine in older versions of winpe and fails in pe2005
A: Yes, net time will not work in WinPE 2005. This actually should not have worked previously. It is a limitation of WinPE that was supposed to be in-place in the past. 

I sure hope there is a hack that will help me get around this limitation. By disabling this ability, M$ just created another hurdle, rather than making life easier.

[os2fan2]

If you want to set times on system, you should ensure that your build of PE has the correct time zone installed.

Note that the default PE installs i used in 2004 did not feature time localisation, to the extent that i wrote a plugin that set the localisations correctly.

There are other reasons that you may want to do this as well, things like file-compare (older/younger), and sort algorithms require that the NLS settings be correctly made.

W

[Jazkal]

os2fan2, would be willing to share your plugin?

[os2fan2]

There's a whole mob of them at

http://www.911cd.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=10048

Wendy.