Comment 4 for bug 946132

Oh, sorry, you said hardware clock, not timezone, so ignore that ... reassigning to clock-setup as this is actually handled in a different place from the timezone question.

I suspect that you have Windows installed, or (less likely) some other DOS-based system or Solaris. In such cases we set the hardware clock to localtime as doing otherwise tends to confuse Windows rather badly. You can override this with "clock-setup/utc=false" as a boot parameter, but we don't currently intend to add UI for it as it would be a rather odd "Break Windows? (yes/no)" kind of question.