Secure Boot locked me out of my own Windows laptop. Here’s what finally fixed it

You turn on your laptop. Or at least, you try. The screen stays black, with just nine words displayed in white: Invalid signature detected. Check secure boot policy in setup.

Congratulations, you have a secure boot problem. But it may not be fixable in the way past internet forum threads and Reddit posts will suggest. Instead, you’ll probably have to roll up your sleeves, break out a USB drive, and run some BIOS updates.

Here’s how I found out the hard way.

A laptop that wouldn’t boot into Windows

Earlier this month, I started up a laptop I hadn’t used in a few weeks. It refused to boot. Instead, it threw up an error message about an invalid signature.

Past internet posters suggested changing the secure boot settings in the UEFI/BIOS. Supposedly, if you turn off the feature, you can get back into Windows.

Unfortunately for me, the secure boot settings were grayed out in this laptop’s UEFI. I couldn’t touch them. And if I’d been most other people, I might have stalled out there.

Secure Boot is currently a mess

ASUS