I needed to put a new domain controller up at one of our production sites this week. We had an older web server in the dev environment that doesn’t get much use these days so I converted it to a virtual machine (I love VMware Converter!) and then reloaded it with Windows 2003 R2.
The install and configuration went fine, but after it had been up and going a few hours I noticed an alarming amount of errors in the Application Event Log. All of them were for Event ID 1054:
That’s a distressing error to get on a domain controller and just a bit puzzling.
I checked my DNS setup, confirmed that this box was pointing to the DNS Service it was hosting and that the secondary was indeed the “main” DNS server back at the office. That all looked fine.
I rebooted and the errors cleared up. Or so I thought…. a spot check the next morning showed tons of them again. They show up every 5, 10, 15, 20 or 25 minutes after an initial 2 or 3 hour period of quiet subsequent to each reboot.
This morning I began an hour or so of wandering through various forum posts and the Microsoft Knowledge Base. I found lots of hits on variations of my error, but none seemed to fit. And, frankly, too many felt like voodoo fixes… At long last and after some odd twists and turns I found KB 938448 titled, “A Windows Server 2003-based server may experience time-stamp counter drift if the server uses dual-core AMD Opteron processors or multiprocessor AMD Opteron processors.”
Guess what? This server is running a dual-core Opteron and the article mentions my error specifically! Bingo.
I applied the simple fix (add a switch in boot.ini) and rebooted and so far things are solid.
To resolve this problem, configure Windows Server 2003 to use the PM_TIMER setting instead of the time-stamp counter. To do this, add the /usepmtimer parameter to the Boot.ini file, and then restart the server.
Note: When I first ran this server through Microsoft Update, I did get a patch titled, “Advanced Micro Devices – Other Hardware – AMD Processor” but I guess that’s not enough in this case. Perhaps I should track down the referenced AMD PowerNow! Technology driver? Or I might just call it good enough for now…
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January 30th, 2009 
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those dam amd’s are always causing problems with me… simple fix was to upgrade to a new company the only uses intels…. and a larger wod at the end of the well… bingo jobs a good’n
The latest AMD Powernow ver 3.04 didnt worked for me on windows 2003 ADS server. Anyhow the /usepmtimer switch which I manually entered in the boot.ini file did the click, after rebooting the server I am not getting the error now. Thanks for the update.