I was getting this a lot in ESXi 3.5 with OpenSolaris snv_95. Until I spotted a useful snippet on the OpenSolaris forums.

I thought, what the hell. I ssh’d into the ‘host’ (you need to enable it, instructions can be found here) and then went to the vm’s directory in vmfs and deleted the .nvram file. Then started up the VM again and the problem was all gone! Woohoo! No more 1986 vm. Now if only the other problems with performance could be sorted.

One Response to “WARNING: Time-of-day chip unresponsive; dead batteries?”

  1. aubs 19. Dec, 2008 at 2:19 pm #

    hi Lee, thanks for the info. your blog entry helped me fix my problem…thx
    aubs
    (australia)