Here's the timeline of events.

1. Had a running MBP 17 Early 2011 Thunderbolt with OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD 115GB drive.
2. Installed Windows 7 via bootcamp. I have done this multiple times before and every time I need to format the bootcamp partition before installing. I think this time I actually deleted the partition and then selected the freespace to install. This worked fine for the most part but I wasn't able to boot the boot camp partition using vmware fusion.
3. I gave up and used the boot camp assistant to revert back to one mac partition. I was getting some odd behavior so I rebooted the machine. It then came up with a message saying no bootable partiton. This made me think (and still does) that the windows install using the free space versus the boot camp partition caused the windows MBR boot loader to get installed incorrectly and mucked up the OS X installation. Ok, fine, I can just reinstall.
4. I can't seem to boot from the original MBP installation DVD. I hold down c on boot but I never get past the all grey screen. I hear the DVD drive spin up but it eventually stops. I put the original HD back in it and everything works fine but when I put the SSD in, I can't boot from the DVD drive.

I have already set up an RMA with OWC to send back the drive but considering the order of events, I feel as though it isn't a hardware issue but can't seem to figure out how to fix it. I can always send it back in but figured I would check and see if anyone could offer some guideance/assistence before doing so.