Hacking Can you boot up a Wii with no disc drive?

[BlueLemming]

I'm attempting at making a somewhat portable Wii. I've yet to take my Wii apart as I'm waiting for some tri-wing screwdrivers to arrive in the mail, but I assume the disc drive adds quite a bit of weight. I've already got everything working with my hard drive, so the disc drive isn't even being used. I assume that it adds quite a bit of weight so why not remove it? I just don't know if the Wii will act as normal if it's taken off.

I came across this thread - http://gbatemp.net/threads/wii-project-no-dvd-drive-present-not-loading-from-usb.331568/ . It seems that even some channels won't work if there's no disc drive. Is there a cIOS or something that can make the Wii think that it's still connected?

 

[donovan6000]

The wii can start up fine without a disk drive, but trying to run most things will give you an error telling you to restart your wii. A solution to this is to take the motherboard off the disk drive and just keep the its motherboard connected to the wii.

Here's a video on how to separate the dvd drive and its motherboard:

 

[BlueLemming]

Awesome, that'll work too! Thanks for the help!

 

[rondoh70]

Here is some advice. Don't remove the circuit board. I found this out the hard way, the wii won't load any official software with the circuit board removed.

 

[KoopaHax35000vr]

get homebrew channel and use wiiflow to play games since u dont want to use the disk drive

 

[BlueLemming]

Wiiflow is what I currently use and it boots into it when I turn it on. You're saying it'll work perfectly without a disc drive?