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"Reboot and Select Proper boot device" error after Disk Clone

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Using Acronis True Image 2019 I used Clone Disk to make a backup from a 1 TB SSD internal hard drive to a USB connected 1 TB normal hard drive.  I set the Clone Disk program to shut down the PC when complete.  I removed the backed up HD and turned on my PC and received the message "Reboot and Select Proper boot device" error.  I created a USB and CDROM Acronis repair tool but neither got beyond the startup screen of the repair tool.  The menu selection never opened up even after leaving it overnight.  What is my next step.  I don't want to re-install Windows and lose 2 months of installing programs.  Help please!

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Robert, welcome to these public User Forums.

When you perform a clone of an internal disk drive to an external drive, Acronis tries to adjust the boot configuration to point to the cloned drive as the new boot device, hence by booting without that external drive it cannot be found!

The downside here is that Microsoft do not allow for Windows to be booted from any external USB drive unless you have their Enterprise edition of Windows and have used their Windows 2 Go tool to make the external drive bootable!

You will need to open the BIOS settings on your PC and look for the Boot priority / device settings.  If you have a UEFI boot PC (with or without Secure Boot enabled), then the boot device needs to be set to "Windows Boot Manager" on the internal 1TB SSD drive.  If you have a Legacy boot PC, then the boot device is the 1TB SSD drive itself (by make / name).

I would highly recommend that you use the Backup tool to make any backups of your OS drive and leave cloning alone unless you intend to actually replace the internal drive by a new drive, and even then, I would suggest that Backup & Recovery is a safer process to use.

See the link in my signature for the differences between Backup and Cloning for more information.

The Enterprise version of Windows 10 no longer has Windows on the Go as of latest update.