[CentOS] 3TB system drive partitioning question

Wed Apr 18 17:45:20 UTC 2012
Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu>

On Apr 18, 2012, at 12:16 PM, John R Pierce wrote:
> ah, I can't see anywhere in the BIOS for this SuperMicro X8DT6 mobo
> where to enable EFI, I guess its not supported.

There are other ways to get booting from GPT, involving shadow EFI  
bootloaders and a shadow MBR.  Most of this was developed for the  
'hackintosh' scene but it should would fine for booting CentOS from  
huge drives.  Look for the Chameleon boot loader.  You'll need to use  
gdisk to set the correct GPT GUID for the Linux partitions to make  
Chameleon boot.  Since you're not necessarily wanting to boot XNU as  
well as CentOS, you wouldn't need the full Chameleon; the simpler  
PCEFI or something like that would work fine, and you wouldn't need  
(nor want) the whole /Extra thing that is used to boot XNU on generic  
PC hardware.

I haven't tried it, but single-booting CentOS 6 on one of those  
bootloaders should work as well as dual-booting XNU and Linux from  
Chameleon and similar fake EFI bootloaders works (many have done this;  
see the insanelymac and infinitemac sites for more info).