You reinstalled Windows or swapped a component, and now the game will not launch. The VALORANT Secure Boot error fix is a BIOS problem, not a VALORANT problem, and it locks out competitive players at the worst possible moment: mid act, mid climb, with a decay timer running. Vanguard refuses to initialise unless Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 are both active. Here is the exact order to check it, enable it and verify it, plus what to do the moment you are back in queue.
Confirm the VALORANT Secure Boot Error Fix You Actually Need
Do not touch BIOS until you know which setting is off. Open Run, type msinfo32 and read three lines in System Summary: BIOS Mode, Secure Boot State and the TPM entry under Security Devices.
BIOS Mode must read UEFI. Secure Boot State must read On. If BIOS Mode says Legacy, Secure Boot cannot be enabled at all until the disk is converted, and enabling it blindly in BIOS will leave you at a machine that refuses to boot. That single check separates a ten minute fix from an evening of recovery media.
Convert Legacy to UEFI Before You Enable Anything
If BIOS Mode reads Legacy, your drive is on MBR partitioning and Windows ships a conversion tool for it. Run mbr2gpt with the validation flag from an elevated command prompt first, and only run the conversion once validation passes clean.
Back up anything you cannot lose before you start. Conversion is reliable and it is still a partition table operation on your boot drive, which is not the moment to discover your last backup is three months old.
Photograph BIOS Before You Touch It
Photograph your current BIOS screens with your phone before you change a single value. Boot order, storage mode and virtualisation settings all live in the same menus, and a photo turns a bad change into a thirty second rollback.
Enable Secure Boot and TPM in the Right Order
Reboot into BIOS or UEFI setup, usually with Delete or F2 depending on your board. Switch to advanced mode, then work through three settings.
Set the boot mode to UEFI and disable CSM or Legacy support, because Secure Boot stays greyed out while compatibility support is running. Enable Secure Boot under the Boot or Security menu, and if the option is locked, restore factory keys or clear the existing keys first. Then enable the firmware TPM: AMD boards call it fTPM, Intel boards call it PTT, and both satisfy the TPM 2.0 requirement without a physical module.
Save, exit, boot into Windows and rerun msinfo32. UEFI and On, or you are not finished.
Reinstall Vanguard, Not the Whole Game
If Vanguard still errors after msinfo32 reports clean, reinstall Vanguard rather than the game. Uninstall Riot Vanguard from Apps and Features, reboot once, then launch VALORANT and let it reinstall the driver against your new firmware state.
Your First Games Back Decide the Act
Downtime costs more than the matches you missed. Crosshair placement decays, util timings drift, and the first hour back is where players donate rating they spent two weeks earning.
Warm up before you queue ranked. Ten minutes of range work, one unrated game to reset your movement, then queue. Elite players treat a return from downtime as a scheduled ramp, not a coin flip on whether the aim shows up.
Rebuild the Reads Before You Spend Rating
Coming back cold is where ranked damage happens. A GG Clan session puts a verified top 1% VALORANT Pro in your lobby to run the ramp with you, calling util and rebuilding your reads before you spend rating finding them alone.
Background: Why Vanguard Demands Secure Boot at All
Vanguard runs at kernel level, and a kernel anti-cheat is only trustworthy if the kernel it loads into is trustworthy. Secure Boot verifies that every driver loaded during startup is signed, which shuts down the bootkit and unsigned driver route that cheat developers use to sit underneath detection.
TPM 2.0 does the other half: it gives Riot a hardware backed identity for the machine, so a banned system cannot reappear with a fresh account and a clean reinstall. The requirement is friction for legitimate players, and it is the reason VALORANT's top lobbies stay as clean as they do.
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