MacBook Pro won't boot from Superdrive

I have a MacBook Pro which is around 7 Months old, I wanted to run Disk Warrior on it but the Macbook Pro wouldn't boot from the disk, tried the MAC install disk same issue.
Holding down the C key at boot time causes the drive to spin up it gets as far as the grey screen with the apple logo then the drive stops. Tried also holding down the alt key, I can see the hard disk and DVD icons but selecting the DVD same thing happens as above.
The superdrive seams to work fine when the machine is running just refuses to boot from it.
Any help would be much appreciated
rgs
Colin

Colin: Are you trying to boot from the Install/Restore DVD that was shipped with your MacBook Pro? If not, do. Your DiskWarrior DVD may not be able to boot your MBP model, and an older Snow Leopard installer DVD can't either.
The best setup for using DiskWarrior or any other Disk utility on your MBP's internal drive is to have a bootable clone of that drive as a backup, with all your utility software installed on it just as it is on the internal drive. Then whenever you have a problem, you can boot from the other drive to repair the troubled one. No need then to boot or run the utilities from a DVD, which is tediously slow at best, even when it works perfectly.

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Edward Durrant wrote:
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Edward Durrant wrote:
My question is, do I need the harddrive in for the laptop to function relatively normally?
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