I have a failure for a CD drive

[MidKnight]

Here I am, trying to play some Battlefield 2, and suddenly, my laptop's CD drive breaks! It refuses to eject, not even when booting! the activity light doesn't even come on!

Is it dead?
how do cd drives die? O_o
my drive isn't modular, it there any way to open it short of prying open the entire case?
is there any way I can play Battlefield 2 given my current situation?

[CarRepairer]

1) You deserve it for turning your back on spring, traitor.
2) Steam, and other things instead of CDs.
3) Your CD drive should have a tiny hole that you can jam a paper clip into to make the CD pop out. If you're lucky it's in the front. If unlucky, you'll have to take the drive out to find it.

[SwiftSpear]

Is it dead?

probably

how do cd drives die? O_o

Usually either a power surge or mechanical error, in your case, since the functionality seems stopped, and your light doesn't work, it sounds like the power has totally failed. There's a small possibility I'll mention that the power cable has come loose.

my drive isn't modular, it there any way to open it short of prying open the entire case?

Laptop CD drives are all modular, the connections are just internal to the laptop. Yes, if you don't have that little paperclip hole thing you will have to open the case. Although, if it's a new enough laptop, the manufacturer will probably fix it under warranty (1 year for most) if you're willing to do without it for 1-6 weeks (depending on the manufacturer and other factors)

is there any way I can play Battlefield 2 given my current situation?

Is it installed yet? If yes, you can download a no-cd fix online, it's actually legal, but be sure to virusscan before installing software like that. If no, buy it on steam and hope you can return the other copy.

[MidKnight]

1) You deserve it for turning your back on spring, traitor.

I'll be back on april 4th/5th

2) Steam, and other things instead of CDs.

after seeing what half life did to a friend of mine ("DOORS!! HE CAN KILL THE COMBINE, BUT HE CANT OPEN DOORS!!!!" yelled at the top of his lungs multiple times each day, no kidding) I'm not taking that risk

3) Your CD drive should have a tiny hole that you can jam a paper clip into to make the CD pop out. If you're lucky it's in the front. If unlucky, you'll have to take the drive out to find it.

hole located. Initializing paper clip grep system
UPDATE: yay for safety pins! I can get the drive open now, but i can't get it to work. it's probably the power cable, as swift said. I'll need to check up on whether my warranty has expired or not

@swift: searching for no-cd fix

[SwiftSpear]

Don't knock steam. It's an unbelievably nice system for getting and playing games. You never need the CD and can download and play your games from any computer just by logging into your account (although some games with copy protection seem to be bitches about that particular feature).

It's not just for halflife either, steam is a game distribution platform in the broadest sense of the word. VERY few PC games try to make it in the AAA market without a steam version available these days. It's also nice for finding indie stuff you otherwise would never have considered.

[aegis]

there are normally 1-2 screws holding the laptop cd drive in, then you can pull it out after either ejecting the drive or using a screw driver to pry through the access hole (varies depending on laptop model)

you shouldn't need to open the case to remove the drive.

replacement drives are about $30-100, and you'll need to make sure it has the right connection interface.

[smoth]

Don't knock steam. It's an unbelievably nice system for getting and playing games. You never need the CD and can download and play your games from any computer just by logging into your account (although some games with copy protection seem to be bitches about that particular feature).

it also forces you to pile all your shit in one place >:|

[MidKnight]

why I knock steam:
1: I can't play portal on both my desktop and my laptop without insane registration thingies.
2: I tend to physically disconnect my pc from time to time, and it's nice to be able to play games without an internet connection at each startup
3: it's a background process.
4: it uses Internet Explorer for rendering

otherwise, i like steam

[aegis]

1: I can't play portal on both my desktop and my laptop without insane registration thingies.
2: I tend to physically disconnect my pc from time to time, and it's nice to be able to play games without an internet connection at each startup
3: it's a background process.
4: it uses Internet Explorer for rendering

1. install steam on both computers, download the game on both computers
2. offline mode works great.
3. unless you manually optimize your running processes and services, don't complain about background processes, and unless you only have 512mb of ram, it shouldn't be an issue.
4. the site works great in firefox; you don't need to view it in the steam client if you're picky about it.

[CarRepairer]

My netbook doesn't even have an optical drive. When I want to install something I put the DVD in some computer on the network and the magic wifi leprechauns send the data to the netbook.

Edit: but I guess if I needed a CD in order to launch something, I'd use daemontools.

[aegis]

the only things I've installed with an optical drive for a long time are operating systems.

a decent iSCSI program can do networked cd/dvd drives pretty well.

[Pressure Line]

2: I tend to physically disconnect my pc from time to time, and it's nice to be able to play games without an internet connection at each startup

'-steam' in the command line (ymmv)

[Apollo]

Don't knock steam. It's an unbelievably nice system for getting and playing games. You never need the CD and can download and play your games from any computer just by logging into your account (although some games with copy protection seem to be bitches about that particular feature).

it also forces you to pile all your shit in one place >:|

some guy i went to school with cheated flat out on css, he braged about it alot aswel and about how he'd abuse players who complained, till the day someone recoreded him wall haxing and steam disabled his whole account and he lost everything including single player games. which made me LOL hard

he thought he could get away with it cause he did it on his clans server

[MidKnight]

well, good news, i can now play my battlefield 2 on a bf2 miniCD (basically an image with only the DRM files mounted onto a virtual drive)

annoyingly, my drive started working again for about 2 minutes, giving it enough time to display an annoying autoplay message, get my hopes up, and then fail.