Windows 10: Used Windows Media Creation to update to Win 11, getting “Proper Boot Device” error.

My system is win11 ready, PC Health Check says so, however update wouldn’t give me the option to update. I used the media creation tool to update my sisters PC and I saw it could update my PC for me, so I did. Now it’s giving this error: “reboot and select proper boot device”. What do I do? Have I lost my files? Thanks

:)

 

Issue with booting the computer and get error message "insert proper media device".

Hi Dan,

Thank you for contacting Microsoft Community. I understand that you have an issue with booting the computer and get error message
"insert proper media device". I will surely help you to fix this issue.

To understand the issue better, let me know if you make any recent changes on the computer prior to this issue?

This issue could have occurred due to these reasons:

1. Conflict between external devices.

2. Corrupt System files.

Try the steps listed here:

Method 1:

Disconnect all peripheral devices except for keyboard and mouse and check if the issue still persists.

Method 2:

If the issue still persists, I suggest you boot the computer from installation media and perform Automatic Repair from Windows Recovery environment.

Step 1:

To create Windows 10 installation media, you may refer the article.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

Step 2:

I suggest you to perform automatic repair from the Windows Recovery environment.

To perform Automatic repair follow these steps:

a) Insert the installation media such as (USB or DVD) and
restart the computer.

b) Press F12 key (typically this is F12, but it can differ between computer manufacturers) and
choose the drive that you inserted the installation media
into.

c) Once the Windows Setup window appears, follow these steps.

d) Click Next and select Repair your computer.

e) You will then see a blue screen and an option to choose.

f) Choose the option Troubleshoot and select Advanced
options.

g) You may choose Automatic Repair from Advanced boot
option.

Hope this information helps. Reply to the post with an updated status of the issue so that we can assist you further.

 

"Reboot and Select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device"

Hi, I recently built a new PC with a 1TB Samsung 860 EVO SSD. I'm installing Windows 10 via USB and I've made the USB top priority in the boot list. However, when I exit BIOS, It gives me an error saying "Reboot and Select proper boot device or insert
boot media in selected boot device and press a." Is their a solution to this?

 

UEFI boot options disappeared from BIOS; now getting reboot and select proper boot device

In short, I need to get the system/BIOS to allow UEFI booting of the SSD.

Computer started up today with default BIOS settings.

• Only SSD 1(Windows boot) and SSD 2 were listed in BIOS; HDD 1 and HDD 2 were not visible
• System would not boot. Gave the 'reboot and select proper boot device' message
• Boot menu has no UEFI/EFI (or Windows Boot Manager) entries anymore

I went into Partition Magic/Gparted and confirmed :

• All drives are still showing
• All drives' data is in tact [EFI volume/partition is still listed (and can be browsed/files accessible)]

Gparted print out (note dev/sda2 apparently that is normal behavior) :

/dev/sda1 (locked) EFI System Partition--Fat32--/media/sda1--100.00mb--46.81MiB--53.19MiB--boot,esp
/dev/sda2 (exclamation mark) Microsoft reserved partition--unknown file system--no mount point--128.00MiB--unused spaced--msftres
/dev/sda3 basic data partition--ntfs--/media/sda3--118.58GiB--70.78GiB--47.80GiB--msftdata
/dev/sda4--ntfs--/media/sda4--450.00MiB--327.71MiB--122.29MiB--hidden,diag



As I am able to boot Windows installation from USB, I tried the standard startup repair. It said it was not able to fix any problems.

Next I tried to repair the EFI with Diskpart in the shell:

• sel vol 1 (note that Diskpart states EFI partition is 'hidden')
• assign letter=z:
• cd /d z:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\
• bootrec /fixboot
• bcdboot c:\Windows /l en-us /s vz /f ALL

It completed all tasks successfully. Unfortunately that did not work.

Other things I have tried :

• Removing CMOS battery and replacing with a new one - my HDD started showing up again after doing this.
• Using the old MBR commands(in hopes it would force the Windows startup repair to recognize and fix a problem)

bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot
bootrec /scanos
bootrec /rebuildbcd​

• Loaded BIOS 'optimized'/defaults (the system did this already once before, hence why I am in this situation, though doing it manually seemed like an option worth trying. Note that after doing this and restarting the system, HDD's stopped showing again)
• Removed new CMOS battery and left it out of the system for thirty minutes
• Formatted EFI and msftres partitions, then rebuilt the EFI boot records

In summary, am looking to force the BIOS to see the EFI partition on the SSD boot drive, as it is not an option any longer.