Hi all -

I've got a couple of Gateway SX2370 desktops that I'm using as hypervisors.  Each can take up to 16GB RAM, and are small, both currently running CentOS 6.3 with the Dreyou repo for VDSM and work great.  My next plan was to use ovirt-node booted from an SD card on them, so I:

. Downloaded ovirt node 2.6.1
. Burned it to a USB stick from my CentOS 6 desktop using livecd-iso-to-disk.
. Booted the stick successfully on the Gateway box (although it saw it as EFI - we'll get to that in a second) and was able to install ovirt-node to the SD card.
. Shut the box down
. Tried to boot the SD card
. The system reports no hard disk upon boot.

The BIOS sees it as an EFI device, so I believe that it can't find the EFI partition, and dies.  The funny thing is that that same SD card will boot on boxes that don't have EFI or UEFI.  And unfortunately, there's no way in the BIOS to disable EFI detection on hard disks.  And it won't let me mark the SD card as "non-EFI" so that I can have a sane "legacy" boot.  And even so, I don't know how to defeat its detection, which is probably picking up on the presence of GPT on the SD card to make its determination.

Anyhoo - here's how I solved it.  From seeing various RH entries in bugzilla over the last year and a half regarding EFI, I decided to cheat, as it doesn't like the bootable partition #2:

. Create a FAT32 filesystem on partition 1 of the SD card
. Create the directory /EFI in partition 1, and copy the contents of <ovirt-node-iso>:/boot/EFI/ to it.
. Edit partition1:/EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.conf and partition1:/EFI/BOOT/grub.cfg to better reflect what's really on the disk.  (I was skimming the thread and post referenced at http://lists.ovirt.org/pipermail/users/2012-February/006279.html for info.)

That got me a 2nd bootable entry in my BIOS, which I was able to set to default and boot from successfully (despite a subsequent warning about secure boot not being available).

So here's my question:  Is there a way that I can submit info back about the ovirt-node install that can help debug the stock install of ovirt-node getting media to boot on a box that won't let me disable EFI?

  -Ian