A method of manufacturing a perpendicular magnetic recording medium and a substrate for the medium are disclosed, in which abnormal protrusions on an underlayer made of a Ni—P alloy are automatically eliminated while maintaining a flat surface with high accuracy on the underlayer, and appropriate texture traces remain to promote magnetization alignment in the vertical direction in a perpendicular magnetic recording medium without adversely affecting the magnetization alignment. In the method, texture processing is carried out on an underlayer made of a Ni—P alloy on a nonmagnetic base plate using a polishing tape while supplying mixed slurry of a surfactant and abrasive grains of polycrystalline diamond, and then, texture polishing is carried out on the underlayer processed by the texture processing, using a polishing tape while supplying slurry containing an abrasive material and an organic acid until the surface of the underlayer is polished to an arithmetic mean roughness Ra of at most 0.5 nm, preferably in the range of 0.05 nm to 0.2 nm.