You can install a virtual optical drive and play the game from a disk image (ISO). Your virtual drive would appear as a new drive letter, so again you might have to do a fresh install from there. Also, I'm not sure if the game's copy protection would object to a non-physical disk. Pirates have ways of getting around that so I won't give you further information.Actually, the entire problem you're having might be related to the copy protection being incompatible with your newer optical drive. The same pirating techniques might let you play your legal copy.
