Acer 8100 Laptop possible w/bios or CD\DVD drive

I'm using the Acronis True Image program on this machine as a recovery system to the operating system partition of this machine. As a part of assuring myself that program works, I tested the bootable disc needed load the program into ram to access the image discs of the C:\ drive. The boot disc only booted to the splash screen of the Acronis program and then the screen went dark. I've tested the boot disc on another desktop I have and it works: the program was loaded into memory and I would have able to re-program the machine. So at this point one of 2 things occurs to me---a problem with the bios or more likely a problem with the CD/DVD drive. Anybody got an idea of what's going on here? And I did arrange the boot order so that the CD/DVD would be first in line. Thanks