Oh boy! Battlefield 6, including the open beta tests, will require that your PC has Secure Boot enabled. This will mean you must have a motherboard and BIOS version that supports it! Fortunately most motherboards these days support secure boot and Windows 11 is forcing the issue for many so if you've already upgraded to 11 then you are probably good to go. Unfortunately if you are in a spot like me still running Windows 10 and never went through the steps to get ready for Secure Boot then it will take some work!
What is secure boot? "Secure Boot is a security standard in modern computers that ensures only trusted and digitally signed software is allowed to run during the system startup process." Basically it stops bad stuff from running when your computer runs up.
Why are games requiring it all of a sudden? Because of cheaters. Cheaters ruin everything. Secure Boot helps game's anitcheat verify the system's integrity since many cheats start up and then hide themselves during the boot up process. Secure Boot reduces the chances of cheater's software being able to hide itself.
What does this mean for the upcoming Battlefield 6 open beta weekend? We are going to hear a lot about Secure Boot! So in the interest of sharing for this fine Blaugust let me walk through the steps I had to take on for my own situation. The good news is the open beta client is available now to preload and while you can't play the actual game you can boot it up to verify your secure boot is good to go.
Note: this situation will be very context dependent on your Windows version and PC hardware. My details are below.
- Windows: Windows 10 Pro
- Motherboard: Gigabyte X570 AORUS ELITE
The first challenge I ran into was figuring out how with the Gigabyte BIOS to get Secure Boot options. This required for me to first disable CSM Support. Once CSM Support was disabled I then had to reboot and enter BIOS set up again. Secure Boot was then available but it would not let me set it to enabled. This seems to be a bug with the BIOS and I had to switch the mode option from Standard to Custom and then back to Standard. Once done Secure Boot was enabled.
However, after booting up my PC refused to boot into Windows. It turns out that my boot drive was still running with an MBR (Master Boot Record) instead of the GPT (GUID Partition Table) which is required by Secure Boot. This was likely a hangover from when I originally upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 10. Fortunately Microsoft has a tool, MBR2GPT, that is a safe and effective way to transition your boot drive.
When I tried to run the command (via command prompt) mbr2gpt /validate I got an error: ERROR: MBR2GPT can only be used from the Windows Preinstallation Environment. Use /allowFullOS to override. It turns out that MBR2GPT is meant to be run in the Windows Preinstallation Environment which takes a lot of hassle to get access to. Instead I researched if it was safe to use the /allowFullOS option and reports indicate it was safe.
After running mbr2gpt /validate /allowFullOS the utility ran and verified my drive was running an MBR. So I ran the mbr2gpt /convert /allowFullOS command and a short time later the process finished and my MBR had been converted to GPT.
I rebooted my computer and entered the BIOS again and walked through the steps to disable CSM Support and enable Secure Boot. I saved the changes and when the PC booted it booted into Windows as expected and once navigating to system settings I could see that Secure Boot was enabled. Success!
The real test was then to boot up the Battlefield 6 open beta client and I was rewarded with....
Voila! I hope your Secure Boot journey is simpler than mine.
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