I bought a new laptop with Windows installed. I selected “Erase disk and install Ubuntu”, and then it tells me to go back to Windows and disable bitlocker.
I can’t go back to Windows, because I don’t have the Bitlocker recovery key to beging with and furthermore I want to wipe the disk clean, why is disabling Bitlocker even required? Additionally when I do “Manual installation”, there is absolutely no way for me to wipe manually.
What is this? Why can’t I install Ubuntu?
Since you want to erase disk and install ubuntu, I am assuming that you don't need to retain Windows, or any data within.
Therefore, open a live session ("Try Ubuntu"), and open GParted. Delete all the Windows specific partitions, and club them to create an ext4 partition (this is where we will install ubuntu later). You can retain the other partitions if they have any required data. If you don't need to retain any data, then you can just delete all the partitions.
Now, open the installation again, and install Ubuntu in the newly created space.
Alternatively, go to manual installation, and delete all the Windows specific partitions.
Mark the EFI partition as boot.
Create another 60 GB ext4 partition from the space you created, and use it as / (root partition - this is the analog of "C Drive" in Ubuntu).
Keep the rest of the space for storage. You can partition it in any manner you wish.
This behaviour is not as outlined in the tutorial on Ubuntu.com and therefore likely to be a bug. A simple workaround without running GParted the live session is outlined in https://askubuntu.com/a/1513667/288322.
