I have recently helped out an installation of a Dell personal workstation (I believe it's an Optiplex desktop) and have been bitten by the same issue (kernel will freeze when loading with a message related to the RTC driver)
After changing /etc/init.d/hwclock{,first}.sh and /usr/sbin/tzsetup so that
all /sbin/hwclock calls used --directisa the bug would go away. This seems
to be an issue in the 2.6 kernels, however (the installer used the 2.6.8
kernel image, I later installed the 2.6.9 but did not try wether it would
break with the hwclock calls)
There seems to be a number of bugs open related to hwclock in util-linux
related to this, even though it's a kernel issue, maybe hwclock could work
around it (See #186973, #22478, #127975, #22478)
Regards
Javier
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