Konami eventually acknowledged that optical media was dying. The official solution, shipped in later updates (like Data Pack 7.00 and the 1.04 EXE), was a digital-exclusive executable.
This is the safest fix because it is legal and virus-free.
How to get it:
Result: Error gone. Game boots instantly.
The error message PES 2013 No CD/DVD-ROM Drive Found typically occurs when the game's SecuROM copy protection cannot verify the presence of the original physical disc WineHQ Forums Top Solutions Run as Administrator : Right-click the pes2013.exe file and select Run as Administrator
to grant the game necessary permissions to access hardware drivers. Compatibility Mode
: If using a modern OS (Windows 10 or 11), right-click the game executable, go to Properties , and set compatibility to Windows XP (Service Pack 3) Mount an ISO Image : Use software like
to mount a virtual disc image of the game. This tricks the software into believing a physical disc is inserted. Install a Patch : Community-made patches, such as
, often include files that bypass the original disc check requirements. Update DVD Drivers Pes-2013-No-Cd-Dvdrom-Drive-Found
: In some cases, Windows may not recognize your drive properly. You can try uninstalling the drive in Device Manager
and restarting your computer to let Windows reinstall the drivers automatically. Microsoft Learn Summary Table: Troubleshooting Steps Run as Admin Bypasses permission restrictions. Compatibility Mode Solves issues with older software on new Windows versions. Virtual Mounting Simulates a physical disc via ISO. Community Patches Removes legacy DRM checks. Are you using a physical disc digital version/ISO of the game? No CD/DVD-ROM drive found (For the mother o' greebus)
Of all the glitches and error messages Roman had faced in his two decades of gaming, this one stung the most.
It was a humid Tuesday night in late August 2024. The air conditioner wheezed its last breath two weeks ago, and Roman sat slumped before a relic: a white, dust-caked PC tower that had somehow survived three moves, one coffee spill, and the death of its original monitor. On the screen, an amber-tinted window glowed with the words:
“PES-2013-No-Cd-Dvdrom-Drive-Found”
Roman blinked. He read it again, slowly, as if sounding out a language he’d once known but forgotten.
PES 2013. His favorite. The last great Pro Evolution Soccer before the series slid into confusion. The one with the perfect weight of the ball, the fake shots that actually worked, the Champions League nights played alone in his dorm room until 3 a.m., wearing headphones so his roommate wouldn’t hear him yell at Andrés Iniesta for missing a one-on-one.
The problem, of course, was the second part: No CD/DVD-ROM Drive Found. Konami eventually acknowledged that optical media was dying
He’d known this day would come. About six years ago, his old DVD drive started making a noise like a lawnmower eating a spoon. Eventually, it stopped reading discs altogether. By then, Roman had already switched to digital stores, Steam, GOG, emulators. The physical disc for PES 2013—a cracked jewel case with a faded cover of Cristiano Ronaldo mid-kick—sat in a shoebox under the bed. But the drive was dead.
He could have found a crack. A no-CD patch. He knew the forums, the gray corners of the internet where kindly strangers uploaded fixes for games long abandoned by their publishers. But something stopped him. Maybe it was pride. Maybe it was the memory of installing that game for the first time: sliding the disc into the tray, hearing the whir, watching the installation bar fill like a slow tide.
Instead, Roman did something ridiculous. He drove to a thrift store the next morning, the one on Grand Avenue that smelled of old upholstery and forgotten holidays. In a bin of tangled cables and modems from 2003, he found it: a Samsung external DVD drive, beige, USB 2.0, with a sticker that said “Property of St. Anne’s School – Library.”
Five dollars.
Back home, he plugged it in. Windows bonged. The drive light flickered green. He inserted the PES 2013 disc, which had a faint scratch shaped like a crescent moon. The drive chugged, coughed, then spun to life.
He launched the game.
The error did not appear.
Instead, the screen went black, then bloomed into the familiar menu: Exhibition, League, Champions League, Edit Mode. The soundtrack—a generic but hopeful orchestral swell—piped through his speakers. Roman’s heart did something strange. It felt like seeing an old friend at an airport baggage claim, the kind you never thought you’d meet again. Result: Error gone
He picked Barcelona versus Manchester United. Two minutes, top player difficulty. The grass was a little too green, the crowds flat sprites, but when Messi received the ball just outside the box, turned, and curled a left-footed shot into the far corner—Roman punched the air.
The external drive hummed quietly the whole time, a sound like a small, diligent insect.
He played until 2 a.m. And when he finally saved his Master League season and shut down the PC, he didn’t unplug the beige drive. He left it there, tethered to the tower like a life-support machine for a heart that still had a few beats left.
The error message was gone. But Roman knew it would return someday—when the disc delaminated, when the external drive’s laser finally died, when Windows finally stopped supporting whatever ancient API PES 2013 depended on.
But not tonight. Tonight, there was a drive. Tonight, there was a disc. Tonight, in a small room with a broken AC, a man in his late thirties celebrated a goal against a computer opponent that didn’t know it had already lost.
Disclaimer: Downloading cracks for pirated copies is illegal. However, applying a "No-CD" patch to a legally owned copy of a game whose DRM no longer functions on modern systems is widely considered fair use for personal archival purposes.
Because SecuROM is deprecated and Konami no longer supports PES 2013, the most common solution in the community is a cracked executable that bypasses the drive check entirely.
A common troubleshooting step is to run the game in "Windows 7 Compatibility Mode" or "Windows XP SP3." This almost never fixes the "No CD/DVD-ROM" error.
Why? Compatibility mode shims the application software (the game logic), but it cannot shim the hardware abstraction layer. If the game calls a Windows API to list optical drives and that API returns "None," compatibility mode does not magically invent a drive for it to see.