How to Disable Secure Boot on Surface 4, 3, and More

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Easy ways to disable secure boot on any Surface laptop

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Last Updated: May 22, 2023

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Surface Pro 4 and Later</ref>

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Surface Pro 3 and Earlier

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Q&A

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Warnings

Secure boot ensures that only digitally signed operating systems run on your Surface device. Secure boot helps protect against bootkits, or malware that infects the master boot record (MBR) on your computer. While there should be no need to change this setting, if you plan on installing an older operating system such as Windows 7 and earlier or run operating systems that are unsigned such as some distributions of Linux, you may need to disable secure boot to be able to run these needed operating systems. This wikiHow will show you how to disable secure boot so you can boot a legacy operating system or an OS that does not support secure boot.^{[1]
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Method 1

Method 1 of 2:

Surface Pro 4 and Later</ref>

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1
Boot into the Surface UEFI. With your Surface powered down, hold the volume up key on the tablet (not keyboard) or the F6 key on Surface Laptop. Then press the power button. Keep on holding the buttons down.^{[2]
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- If neither of these options work, then hold the shift key while restarting your computer, then go to Troubleshoot > Advanced options > UEFI firmware settings, and choose Restart.
2
Choose the Security tab. This tab is on the left pane of the UEFI screen.
- If text is upside down, then make sure that the keyboard cover connector is oriented downward.
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If you are installing a third party signed operating system, choose Microsoft and 3rd party CA instead. Then choose OK.
You know if your Surface has secure boot off if you see a red screen or red bar when you power it on.

Method 2

Method 2 of 2:

Surface Pro 3 and Earlier

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1
Boot into the Surface UEFI. With your Surface powered down, hold the volume up key on the tablet (not keyboard). Then press the power button. Keep on holding the buttons down.
2
Choose Secure boot control.
3
Choose Disabled or Delete secure boot keys on the popup that appears.
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Choose Exit setup.
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Choose Yes. You know if your Surface has secure boot off if you see a red screen or red bar when you power it on.

Community Q&A

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The Secure Boot option on my Surface 3 is grayed out and I can only access the "Device Information" tab. How do I access the other tabs?

Aasim

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Did you or your organization set a firmware password? If so, then you will need to enter it to change firmware settings. Note that you cannot recover your firmware password if you lose it, so keep it safe. (There is probably software that can crack the firmware password of any computer.)

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Warnings

Under normal circumstances, you should not turn off secure boot. This makes your computer more vulnerable to rootkits or bootkits.

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