Learning While Aging

Selected boot image did not authenticate error after rolling back Windows Insider update

If you are in the Windows Insider Program and later on decided to opt out, you can choose to roll back to the last stable release you installed. However, the rollback may cause a very annoying error as show in the screenshot above: Selected boot image did not Authenticate. Press <Enter> to Continue. When you press <Enter>, you computer will shut down and the error repeats when you restart your computer. Based on my investigation, this seems to happen especially to HP computers, since my laptop is HP Envy, I got the exact error message after I tried to opt out Windows Insider Program and to roll back to the normal release.

Well, the good news is that it is quite easy to fix it.

  1. Turn on the computer and enter the BIOS (press F10 for my HP Envy)
  2. Enable “Legacy Support”, and it will automatically disable “Secure Boot” (the secure boot causes the error)
  3. Ignore all the warnings about disabling the Secure Boot and save the BIOS saves, then reboot your computer

Now you should be able to boot your computer. After reboot, go to Settings -> Update & recovery -> Recovery, the click “Get started” under “Reset this PC”. Then follow the instructions to reset your PC. After the Windows is reinstalled, go back to the BIOS to disable “Legacy Support” so the Secure Boot will be re-enabled. The Secure Boot can prevent your PC from being hacked, so make sure you have it enabled.

The Windows Insider Program is for tech geeks who want to try out new features at an early stage, so the Insider participants are basically free Windows testers. I have been an Insider participant for a while and finally decided to opt out. Among all the reasons such as frequent Windows update installs and heavy Internet data usage due to update download, the main reason is my graphics card from Intel slows down my PC performance. Unfortunately Intel does not release driver updates as often as they should be (that is why I like Nvidia card because of their regular driver updates), my HP Envy laptop (i7 CPU with 16GB RAM) is not performing well with the Windows Insider Previews, but runs nicely with Windows stable release.

Hope this helps.