[Users] ovirt node 2.6.1 installation succeeding, but not booting on Gateway SX2370

[Ian Forde]

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
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