backed up, restored to new ssd, booted, reformatted old, won't boot

I'm at a loss. I can't even figure out what happened.

Ok, this is on a client's machine, which makes it worse...
Dell from a couple years ago. I backed up the drive, using Acronis. The old drive was 1 TB. I then cloned the disk to a new SSD, also 1 TB. It went fine. I rebooted, it was much faster of course, so I knew it was booting from the SSD. I did it a few times to be sure. All was good. The I reformatted the old drive. I restarted to show the client, and it wouldn't boot.

It said something about Insert Boot disk to continue.

I just don't know what happened, it WAS working, and then it stopped.

Now I'm trying an emergency restore and hoping that works.

Help!

Oh, I tried booting from a plain Win7 disk, hoping the repair utilities would fix the problem. I got a message saying it was invalid for this version. I tried a Win7 32 bit CD. Same thing. I tried a "universal" disk I made a few years ago. Same thing. So I don't know.

How do I do a startup repair if the Windows CD won't let me in to the repair tools? I'm not getting a message about Bootmgr Missing. Is there a way to fix this manually?

Ok, that is the problem. How do I fix it? It won't allow me to startup from a Win7 CD, when I try to run to startup repair, it says the CD is invalid. I think I need to find another way to do it. I'm in panic mode here. None of the methods on that MS page work for me.

I have tried 3 different ones, nothing works.

I don't know what you mean by "do it right" but - brand new Win7 CD from an MSDN ISO copy, and it still says This Version of System Recovery Options is not compatible...