6831 FX could not boot from disc but reads disc fine in windows.

Anyone else having this problem? The drive reads discs without any problem. The problem is it does not boot from the CD. If you use one time boot menu (F10) it does not appear in the list. If you go to BIOS settings under boot options, the disc drive has an exclamation point right before it.
I've swapped it with my other 6831 that has a working DVD drive.. still has the ! beside it in BIOS setting. I was planning to try to update BIOS but before I do that maybe someone else had this problem and had a definite solution that works?
Anyone?

Thanks.

 

first id try to load the default BIOS settings. if that doesn't help reflash BIOS and see if it fixes it.

 

yeah do excatly what ybc said. if it still has the problem could be a really bad sign.

 

i actually already loaded BIOS defaults before swapping a known good drive.
Whats weird is that the drive works perfectly while in windows. The darn thing just wont boot from the drive. I have tried asking what the exclamation point means by calling gateway phone support, chat and email support and all they want is for me to pay for out of warranty service for that basic question.

 

well you tried two optical drives so reseating the drive won't help. try to reflash the bios and see what happens.

 

def reflash the bios

 

I think the P series uses a customized version of a Phoenix BIOS, which in my previous Sager notebook, meant that if the BIOS listed a device with an exclamation mark next to it, that device was disabled. You should be able to toggle this through the BIOS.

 

by any chance do you know what key to press? I think i've read all the available options in there and I don't see any instruction on how to enable or disable. I could remove the boot device from the list though but nothing that puts a ! in front of it. I'll try going into BIOS again and read letter for letter and see if I see something else.

 

update: finally just decided to update it to the latest BIOS available.
used a usb bootable flash drive (thanks to zfactor for the info). Issue is now fixed! Thanks for all the responses.