Tech Help with No CD?

[Grammar]

Hey, I did a full install of both BG2: SoA and ToB. I was wondering if there is a way to play w/o the CD in the CD-ROM drive? The reason I ask this is because even though my CD is in the CD-ROM drive, the CD-ROM drive will not open, nor will it respond to anything.
Note: My problem started this morning at around 9:50 PST.

[Animal]

There are, ermmm...patches available that will allow you do do such things, although I do not know if there is one available for BGII or not. I would suggest buying a new CD drive, their dirt cheap these days.
One warning, Ziroc and the mods frown on the discussion of such 'patches,' as they are usually indicitive of software piracy.

[SixOfSpades]

In the "Rules & Regulations," Ziroc states that No-CD cracks are allowed, providing that the person actually owned the things at the time (but broke their Disc 2 or something), and aren't just sharing 1 set of discs among 10 people.

[Animal]

Actually the more I think about it, the more it sounds like a power problem. You do have power to the CD drive right?

SixOfSpades, I stand corrected.

[605]

I play with no CD all the time, but it's not a patch. I bought a 'program' called 'Game Drive' at an electronics store. Before I explain, know that it won't fix your current problem cause you need the cd drive working to get this up and running. And I do not share this information to promote piracy of cds, just for conventional ease of play.

Anyway, what it does is creates infinate 'virtual cd drives' on your computer. All that means is that it convinces your computer that you have more cd drives than you really do. Then, Game Drive copies a whole game cd and make a VCD file of it. When you open Game Drive's manager window, you can create all the 'virtual cd drives' you want and as many VCD's as you want (or your hard drive has room for )... then, all you do is drag the VCD icon into the virtual cd drive, and the computer thinks you're actually putting a physical cd in a cd drive. This allows you to play with no cd's... like me. All I did was install BG2 on a full install and make a VCD of disc 2 (the play disc) and now when I wanna play, I just open BG2 and it thinks the cd is already in.

It works really well with other games too. I borrowed games off of people and made VCD's of them and I can play whole games now with no cd's... and if the game gets corrupt from mods or whatever, no need to reborrow the cds. As long as you have VCD's of each disc, you can reinstall the whole 4cd BG2 game from VCDs. Just be careful to 'eject VCD' when you're done, or when you restart your computer it'll still think there's however many cds in drives and start the Autoplay for each one, like it normally does when you restart with a cd in the drive. *shrug* Maybe it's something to look into, cause like I said, it works fine for me [img]smile.gif[/img]

ADD -> woohoo I'm a dungeon master!

[ 02-26-2003, 10:02 PM: Message edited by: 605 ]

[Grammar]

Originally posted by Animal: Actually the more I think about it, the more it sounds like a power problem. You do have power to the CD drive right?

Hum.... I'm not exactly a technical person. However, it was working fine till I got home today. Then, the CD drive just didn't... um... work. I'm going to get my dad to have a look at it when he's available, and if it doesn't work, we'll figure out how to replace it this weekend. Until then... I guess I'll just dream about BG2.

btw, no one knows about a no-CD crack?

605: Doesn't that take a lot of space on your computer, having all those CDs constantly kept on it?

[Gangrell]

Actually I had the same problem, I guess sometimes it sticks. My CD-Rom wouldn't open nor could it read the cd I had in it, but after I restarted it and kept pressing the open button, it worked. Maybe I play it too much, I don't know [img]tongue.gif[/img]

If you're talking about ram space, it won't take up that much if you don't have a lot on your drive. Say if you've downloaded movies or music, that'll take up a lot of room and you might have a problem installing it. Also happened to me, that's why I have two drives [img]smile.gif[/img]
But as long as you have enough space on it, you'll be fine, so, hope this helps.

Peace

[Luvian]

Originally posted by Grammar: Hey, I did a full install of both BG2: SoA and ToB. I was wondering if there is a way to play w/o the CD in the CD-ROM drive? The reason I ask this is because even though my CD is in the CD-ROM drive, the CD-ROM drive will not open, nor will it respond to anything. Note: My problem started this morning at around 9:50 PST.

I'm PMing you the link to a website with a no-cd patch to TOB.

[605]

605: Doesn't that take a lot of space on your computer, having all those CDs constantly kept on it?

It's surprisingly not a lot of space... but I have a 60 gig hard drive in my pc, I have 5-6 games on it (full cd's saved, mind you), about 130 video clips on Kazaa, 600+ songs, and every episode of South Park on Real Player, and I still have around 20 gig left. So 1-2 gig for BG2 shouldn't kill you, even with a smaller drive. Besides, like I mentioned, if you have the cds yourself and just don't want to need one to play, you can just do the Play CD and it's only like 500mb

[Annatar]

Originally posted by 605: It works really well with other games too. I borrowed games off of people and made VCD's of them and I can play whole games now with no cd's.. and if the game gets corrupt from mods or whatever, no need to reborrow the cds. As long as you have VCD's of each disc, you can reinstall the whole 4cd BG2 game from VCDs. Just be careful to 'eject VCD' when you're done, or when you restart your computer it'll still think there's however many cds in drives and start the Autoplay for each one, like it normally does when you restart with a cd in the drive. *shrug* Maybe it's something to look into, cause like I said, it works fine for me [img]smile.gif[/img]

Yes I saw your note that you are not trying to legalise piracy, but what I noted out in your text... you borrow games and use virtual cd-drive to make a ''copy'' of them... isn't this the same as copy a real cd... because you do not buy the game but you still play it with the use of this so called virtual cd-drive.. isn't it a form of piracy then?

[ 02-27-2003, 05:35 AM: Message edited by: Annatar ]