I have a Windows 11 laptop and recently gotten excited to try Linux. I read good things about Mint being pretty good to go out of the box, and while I can be a fast learner I’m also tired and don’t have a tremendous amount of bandwidth.
So I followed all the installation instructions, verified, flashed a USB, booted into it and started to install a dual boot of it. Made it through installation until it told me my computer had BitLocker on, and I’d need to go turn it off and try again. Fair enough.
Went back into my Windows OS (after booting it went to “diagnosing your PC”). I don’t seem to have bitlocker installed - looks like a Pro version thing which I don’t have. It did show that encryption was enabled, so I turned it off.
Restarted to boot to USB. Nope, “mmx64.efi - Not Found” error.
OK, googled it, renamed it, let’s go.
error: shim_lock protocol not found error: you need to load kernel first
OK… I googled it just enough to see this is going to be a pain.
I tried remaking my USB just in case, didn’t help. It’s extra frustrating because my first attempt to boot into Linux went so well! How did it go from booting into it flawlessly to giving me a series of errors?
Did I anger the Microsoft gods and now they’re blocking my path? Is this a bad omen that Linux is going to be a problem on my laptop in general?
Exactly what happened.
Microsoft is deliberately making it crazy hard to use linux. We’re so used to dealing with hostile relationships recently that we dont even recognize this broken situation.
Anyway, can you try installing it on separate ssd? Its rather hard to run it in dual boot because windows will frequently fuck up your bootloader and so on.
Btw bitlocker is the encryption.
Windows is literally malware
I had a bad feeling that dual booting wouldn’t be the seamless thing I hoped for. I have an old Mac laptop I might try installing on to see how I like it and decide if I’m just gonna wipe Windows entirely.
It’s incredible how shit Windows is and everyone just accepts it. It shows me ads on my lock screen FFS (and I know how to disable that cuz I’ve done it three times now and they keep coming back like a horror movie monster you didn’t behead).
You’re hitting the nail on the head. That and all the benefits that linux holds are the reason why i wipe windows from every computer i can get my hands on.
It takes some doing, but you can live boot windows from a USB drive for those rare instances you need it. You can also just install it to a VM inside Linux (also not easy). But honestly these days the times where you’ll NEED Windows are few and far between (and getting fewer and farther).
For the record, installing Windows in a VM and getting it to work can be a real pain in the ass. Just a little warning: don’t expect VM-Windows to be easy!
Why is it hard? It used to be real easy to run in a VM. I am running windows 11 in docker and it was easy, maybe consider that?
True, I edited my comment. I personally recommend the USB method (or if you have easy access to the internals- just swapping out an SSD).
That’s probably the better (but more complicated) solution.
Unfortunately, the windows bootloader issues are also ingrained in UEFI for many motherboards. Every few days I start my PC up and it has decided my grub entry is garbage and does me the favor of removing it and defaulting back to the windows bootloader.
I’ve worked around this by adding a bootcfg entry to the windows bootloader that points at grub. Now any time this happens, I pick the grub entry from the windows bootloader, my PC reboots, and now it’ll keep defaulting to grub again until the next time it decides to wipe it.
how did you add grub to the windows bootloader’s menu? I thought microsoft made this impossible, along with adding older windows versions
iirc it was using Method 3 on this guide (but my efi path looks different).
Edit: oh, I also definitely used
bcdedit /copyto clone the windows entry, and then edited the clone.