I turned on Secure Boot and my Ubuntu laptop stopped booting

Albert Mitini — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 02:16:11 +0000

I have an old HP EliteBook Folio 9470m (2014, BIOS F.48) running Ubuntu. I had just upgraded to the latest version Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS resolute, and I thought I would turn on Secure Boot while I was at it. I restarted and Ubuntu would not boot.

I went back into the BIOS, switched Secure Boot off, and Ubuntu came up again. Then I checked the state from inside Ubuntu:

mokutil --sb-state

It said:

Setup Mode means the firmware has no Platform Key enrolled. With no keys, Secure Boot has nothing to check anything against. i went Looking back at the BIOS, I had switched the key option from HP’s keys to “Customer Keys” and never enrolled any. My best guess is that this is what kept it in Setup Mode.

In the BIOS I wanted to go back to “HP Factory Keys”, but that option and “Customer Keys” were greyed out. They only unlocked after I unticked SecureBoot first. I selected HP Factory Keys, ticked SecureBoot again and saved.

After that the laptop went into a loop. It showed a “Reset system” screen, then a blank screen, then Caps Lock blinking with nothing on the display. It blinked continuously with no pause, so I couldn’t read an error code from it. I left it alone, did a full power drain, and eventually got back into the BIOS.

At some point I also deleted the custom boot path in the BIOS, and that made things worse. Ubuntu was still in the boot list, but the laptop would not start it by itself. From the F9 boot menu I could pick Ubuntu and it booted every time, with Secure Boot active:


$ mokutil --sb-state
SecureBoot enabled

I checked the boot entry from Ubuntu, and BootOrder was set correctly to Ubuntu’s shim.

I also confirmed the fallback files already existed in /boot/efi/EFI/BOOT/

I even copied the shim into the folder HP looks at by default. None of it changed anything.

Where I am now: Secure Boot works and Ubuntu runs fine, but I still have to press Esc, then F9, then choose Ubuntu on every cold boot. I haven’t solved the auto-boot part. If you’ve dealt with this on an old HP BIOS, please help me out.

PS:If you’re about to try this on your own old laptop, run mokutil --sb-state before you touch any key settings, and change one BIOS setting at a time.
Once the reset loop starts, don’t keep saving changes.

DEV Community: Albert Mitini

I turned on Secure Boot and my Ubuntu laptop stopped booting