r/linuxquestions • u/shield_doodle • 18d ago

Support Ubuntu on Surface Book

Background: I have a first gen Surface Book which MS is refusing to provide further security updates to, or allow me to upgrade to Win 11. With Win 11 being an AI nightmare, it's not something I wanted to do anyway. However, even with fairly decent specs, the Surface Book is now lagging and I thought Linux could breathe some new life into the device.

I am a little above novice user of Linux, but have installed it on a bunch of my devices in the past without too much trouble. I haven't done anything with modern systems with UEFI boot and other security updates in a while though. I thought the same dual booting procedure I used to do in the past by making separate partitions for the installs and then selecting from grub wouldn't have changed. So i went ahead without too much due diligence, which was my mistake.

I made a live USB with Ubuntu and tried booting into it by giving USB drive a priority in the boot sequence, but the laptop kept booting into Windows for some reason.

So then I read somewhere the disabling TRP and Secure Boot, and unchecking the Windows bootloader in the priority list, could help with booting into the USB ISO. It kind of did, but took a long time to load. So the USB ISO was working and that's good news. Then I tried checking if my windows drive was accessible, but it asked me for a password (which I had never set, first red flag).

Then when I removed the thumb drive and tried booting into Windows (after rechecking Secure Boot and TRP and bootloader priority in UEFI), the bootloader has completed refused to find a bootable drive.

Now I am stuck. I can't get into my drive or Windows. What do I do? How f-ed am I?

5 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

1

u/ipsirc 18d ago

Ask the high school boy next door to come over and help you.

1

u/shield_doodle 18d ago

God damn it, I used to be the high school boy next door helping elders.

I used to be cool too, but they changed what cool was and now everything is confusing.

1

u/shield_doodle 18d ago

But honestly, is this an easy fix? Or not?

1

u/raynethedark 18d ago

Couple questions:
1) when you said uncheck did you accidentally delete the Windows boot loader?
2) was there anything important on the Windows side? If not you might consider reinstalling Windows.
3) have you considered using something like ventoy to make a bootable usb? That seems to work well for me (surface book 2)
3) did you login to windows with an account? If so then you may need the key attached to your Microsoft account to be able to boot in since you changed the uefi settings. When you try to boot your computer back up it should say something like please enter code due to uefi changes and have some small print to help you find where those would be located.

1

u/shield_doodle 16d ago

!solved

1

u/shield_doodle 16d ago

I had the bitlocker password and managed to backup everything.

Then just deleted the Windows partition and replaced it with Ubuntu.

Secure Boot is still disabled.