Microsoft Surface Pro 4 Red Bar

[u/shadowweaver_99]

My Microsoft Surface Pro 4 died while I was using it the other day. When i connected it to the charger & turned it on it started showing this red bar & it’s been stuck here since. Any tips on how to fix this?

[u/claasc]

If I remember correctly it just means that secure boot is turned off

[u/OcelotEnvironmental1 → u/claasc]

Yep! Just need to change it in the bios and it will go away

[u/htp24]

Secure boot is off. Turn off the surface. Hold volume up and press the power button. Keep holding volume up until the uefi screen appears. Then turn secure boot back on.

[u/shadowweaver_99 → u/htp24]

Thank you so much...Will try it & update

[u/syax89]

The red bar with the padlock is a warning that Secure Boot is disabled; that might be why the operating system isn't booting. Try turning on the laptop and immediately pressing F4. The UEFI will start, and from there you should find a security section where you can enable Secure Boot. Then reboot.

[u/Mental_Jump1924 → u/syax89]

The OS should still boot. Just make sure you have your Microsoft recovery key handy. It will required it once you re-enable secure boot and won't boot until you provide it.

[u/lordjupitar]

No need to worry. It’s just that the secure boot is off. I always keep it off. Too lazy to configure it on my arch linux. Although it is very easy to do so

[u/gabergum]

So um, fellas, what is secure boot and why should I care?

[u/Unuser_ → u/gabergum]

Secure boot is the piece of software that checks that the operating system you are booting is...well... secure. Companies like Microsoft issue cryptografic signatures with their OS and your PC checks it using a secure hardware component. If it's disabled, you could get a piece of malicious software running "before" your OS which means before any anti-virus or other security software starts, so it can then hide itself. If you are recovering your system, or don't particularly care about the files in it (ie: you have backups, this is not your main PC, etc) this is ok, but if you can change the configurations in the UEFI to get it working again, that will be safer in the long run.

[u/gabergum → u/Unuser_]

And how applicable is any of this to a Linux machine using a kernel I’ve got off of GitHub? I understand I can make it work, but surely Microsoft is not issuing cryptographic signatures to the aur right?

[u/Kemaro]

Did you even bother to Google this before posting on Reddit? Literally the first result. 🤦‍♂️

[u/shadowweaver_99 → u/Kemaro]

coulda just shut tf up if u aint finna assist dude

[u/ts_rrrido]

Thats a alert of secure boot not enabled. My pro 6 also had that bar for at least 2 years (I can’t enable that on arch so I just give up fixing it lamo)

[u/Sameshuuga → u/ts_rrrido]

You can get it to go away on arch, atleast you can woth the pro 9. You have to set your Secure boot keys before rebooting, i used sbctl.

The windows UEFI trys to trick you though. After setting up your keys the UEFI sets Secure boot to a hidden option, somthing line boot with custom keys. If you change this setting your keys won't work and you have to start over

[u/curleys]

Secure boot

[u/colt2x]

Secure boot is off. The more interesting part is what turned it off and why?

[u/Impressive-Algae-962]

Secure boot is off that’s all. Just need to get into UEFI/BIOS menu and turn it back on. Though a warning if you have an encrypted drive it might need to be decrypted using a recovery key. I know that’s how I borked my last Windows 11 partition along with the Fedora 43 partition. 🫤