A lot of commentary here and in the article was worrying to me. Directly relevant since I bought a cheap (good value) Lenovo G510 laptop today that came with Win 8.1.
I didn't want to use Windows at all, just boot Clonezilla straightaway, clone the HDD and then install Debian. No go on booting from CD - "not allowed" due to the security setup. Ah, OK .. so it then boots Win 8.1 and I had to go through various Windows setups I wanted to avoid before rebooting and trying again.
It was then I had to figure out the BIOS side of things and saw it was all UEFI. I just turned it off and switched to "legacy" mode (BIOS legacy I assume) and disabled secure boot. Cloned the HDD, booted the Debian Testing CDROM and now have a "Jessie" install on it.
I didn't want to use Windows at all, just boot Clonezilla straightaway, clone the HDD and then install Debian. No go on booting from CD - "not allowed" due to the security setup. Ah, OK .. so it then boots Win 8.1 and I had to go through various Windows setups I wanted to avoid before rebooting and trying again.
It was then I had to figure out the BIOS side of things and saw it was all UEFI. I just turned it off and switched to "legacy" mode (BIOS legacy I assume) and disabled secure boot. Cloned the HDD, booted the Debian Testing CDROM and now have a "Jessie" install on it.