I couldn't send it back with a boot up message saying Boot Failure.

I went in the BIOS and changed the boot order.  I explained to him that he could still boot from a CD or DVD if he wanted or needed to by pressing F12 immediately after pressing the start button and selecting the CD/DVD drive.

I doubt that he will ever boot from a CD so it's probably a non issue.

I found that I could boot from the CD drive and the computer seems to run fine when booting from the hard drive.  I found several "fixes" on the Internet but there were conflicting comments as to their usefulness.  I didn't think it was worth the effort after changing the boot order.