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?
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seems like a secure boot issue, make sure in your bios settings:
- Windows fast boot is disabled
- Secure boot is disabled
- AVX512 is disabled (if you have an option for it in cpu settings)
The AVX512? Why would you disable that?
I had a problem once booting into linux with it enabled, this was quite a while ago and it works fine now but mint could be running on a kernel old enough to have problems with it?
Unlikely. They’re not RHEL.
shim_lock protocol not found appears to be a result of secure boot failing. One simple solution would be to go to the BIOS and disable SecureBoot. You can also try to configure it to recognize your efi but I’d turn it off first and see if that helps.
Probably a secure boot issue Microsoft likes to cause issues for OS on the same HDD/SSD. Maybe try mint in a VM in windows and if you like it. Let her rip.
This is a bit of a hack, but while you wait for a new drive or laptop, you could install Linux onto a thumb drive and run it from there.
When you use Rufus to write the image to the flash drive, it should give you the option to create a persistent storage section with a slider to say how much of the drive to allocate to that. At least this should keep Microsoft from destroying the data on it, lthough it will probably ask every time it starts up whether you want to format that drive.
This way you can just use whatever your BIOS boot key is, probably something like F12, to boot onto your Linux and keep it away from Microsoft :)
I had a very similar issue when starting my Linux journey, also on a laptop running windows 11. I could not actually fix the issue until I tried installing a different distro entirely.
Check it Ventoy, it’s become a handy tool for me. Lets you have several bootable ISOs or images on a single USB.
Interesting, what distro did you end up using?
I’ve tried quite a few but right now the longest surviving one is Manjaro. This system still dual boots (technically a actually triple boot lol), so you can fix the issue.
I also have Fedora on another pc and I don’t care for it. I also have dabbled very lightly with Debian (hosting some services), Kubuntu, Ubuntu, Endeavour, Cachy, Mint, KDE Neon, and PopOS.
I have liked the Arch based distros the most so far, and highly prefer KDE Plasma as a desktop environment.
Just to add a note for OP: If your not into tinkering and taking care a of your OS don’t even think to try any Arch based distro. There’s a minimum time you have to spend to keep your system healthy.
Just recentlty I had a boot issue after an update (black screen on boot without login or tty) and after a lot of debugging and websearch couldn’t fix my issue. At first I though of a fuckedup bootloader or to long wait time between updates but It was a recent issue with MESA and nvidia driver.
Had I looked up the EndeavourOS forum rather then my own search results that would have avoided a fuckedup fresh install wich didn’t solved the issue either.
So yeah, there was a solution out there (downgrade MESA, install new nvidia driver rather than nouveau) but I wasn’t looking in the right place 🫤 So here I’m with a fresh install…
Bitlocker many meanings: in this case, it just refers to your disk encryption, and not the pro feature.
DuelDual boot can be a pain. I wish you good luck!Duel boot
That’s probably the best way to describe it.
Dyslexia strikes again…
Get a 2nd drive to install it on. Dual booting will only cause you trouble and headaches. For example, if you manage to fix it, next update it will break again.
You can install Mint on a usb drive, or external ssd. I personally run it on two of my machines where the internal drive died, on a usb stick. These wear out, but hey, for now, it works. So get a second usb, and install it there, or nuke Windows to get it to run well.
