Deactivating Optical IDE Drive
 

In the instructions for a mini-image I'm trying to use it tells me to "Unplug/Deactivate (depends on hardware) optical IDE drives". Since I don't want to open up my computer every time I want to play this game how can I temporarily deactivate it?

depends very much on your hardware setup...

on some machines you can disable the drive using device manager, on others you can't and the only course of action is to disconnect the power and cable physically by opening up the pc...

if you want to play game then this trick will not work .
the alternate way to deactivate drive is from BIOS.

-Restart computer
-press DELETE key at boot time.
-disable optical/ CD-Rom.
-save & exit

now you don't need to unplug physically .

Does not encessarily work on all kinds of hardware, if the copy protection - that also does direct accesses to the hardware - can find it.