GT70 not able to boot from CD/DVD

I just received my GT70 0ND-492US today and love the hardware so far. The operating system (Windows 8) leaves a LOT to be desired...

Anyway, I'm trying to take an image of the hard drive (mSATA drive, actually) and I can't seem to boot from a CD/DVD. Here's what I've done:

1. Checked BIOS to make sure Boot option #1 is Internal Blu-Ray drive. It is set as option #1
2. Checked BIOS to make sure it recognizes BD drive. It does.
3. Checked Windows 8 to make sure it could read DVD... No problem there.
4. Pressed F11 to specifically choose BD drive to boot from... It's not even listed as an option??!?!?! Only IPv4, IPv6, and Windows OS
5. Plugged in external DVD, made sure it would try to boot from external in BIOS, and it won't boot from that either.
6. Tried 3 different boot CD (UltimateBootCD, Windows Vista, EaseUS ToDO Backup Workstation) which I use almost daily on other machines and they boot flawlessly... They won't boot.

I'm bewildered... What does it take to boot from the Blu-Ray/DVD/CD drive on this machine? Anybody have any suggestions?

 

Did you install any additional software since you received the notebook?

Daemon Tools is one software that I know of that can cause your issue.

 

I've added nothing. I usually make an image of the laptop in its original condition just in case I ever have to go back to the beginning. Great thinking, though!

I guess I'm also curious if anyone else can boot from a CD? Maybe nobody else has needed to or tried and all of these GT70 have this problem?

 

Are your date/time zone settings correct in BIOS? I've read of boot problems people had because they were not configured correctly.

 

As a last resort you can try Control Panel>Action Center>Recover>PC Settings>General>Remove Everything and Restore Windows 8

This takes about half an hour.

I find a clean W8 installation to be much faster.

 

Ok. Problem solved. Here is the process, saved for others:

In the BIOS there is a Tab named Boot and there is an option called Boot Mode. My Boot Mode was set to 'UEFI'. Once I changed the Boot Mode from UEFI to Legacy, the settings for Boot Option #1, #2, etc. were useful and I could boot from CD/DVD. I guess when Boot Mode is set to UEFI you only get the loading options listed in the UEFI Network and UEFI Hard Drive BBS settings section. Hopefully that helps somebody else!

I had heard that UEFI was wonderful and magical, but seems weird that it doesn't (at least in this BIOS) allow for loading from a CD/DVD. Maybe somebody who understands it better can enlighten me.

 

Found this:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface#Booting_an_OS_using_UEFI

"UEFI firmware does not support booting through the above mentioned method which is the only way supported by BIOS... UEFI does not launch any boot code in the MBR whether it exists or not."

And this: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749064(v=ws.10).aspx