An error has occurred setting the element data. The value is protected by Secure Boot policy and cannot be modified or deleted

I got my first personal laptop last weekend. Since I want to run couple of VMs, went for a bit high configuration. While setting up VMware Server on this laptop, I experienced a problem where drivers signing is failing on Windows 8. A quick search in Google suggested that I should disable driver signature enforcement on my Windows 8 computer with the help of below commands.

bcdedit -set loadoptions DDISABLE_INTEGRITY_CHECKS
bcdedit -set TESTSIGNING ON

I went ahead with above commands but the second one is failing with below error message

An error has occurred setting the element data. The value is protected by Secure Boot policy and cannot be modified or deleted

I made sure that I am running this in elevated command prompt but it didn’t help. After some struggle I came to know that there a feature in BIOS(called as secure boot) that restricts modification to some of the boot loader features. So, I went into the BIOS and searched for some thing that represents “Secure Boot” and disabled it. After that I am able to run command without any issues.

Hope this helps..

PS: You might want to ask whether it allowed me to install VMware Server on my Windows 8 laptop. Answer is NO. I am still facing the driver signature verification issue and the installation keep failing. Vmware services are not starting after the installation. I am still troubleshooting this on my PC; will make a separate post about it.