There is a way to not disable the DRC, but it is really tedious.
You can give/change the net name for each pad, so you just need to:
1 - place all the footprints you want,
2 - put you cursor on a pad, press the "e" key on your keyboard to open the edit windows (you may have to clic on the pad before, or it may show a popup menu to select, select the pad and not the footprint.
3 - in the "Pad Properties" windows, there is a field "Net name", give the pad a netname that need to match all the pads you want to connect
4 - clic OK to validate
5 - Go back to 2 for each unchanged pad.
Then the board connectivity should be good for using the DRC to check if it's correctly routed, if it's still not see the connection, you may use the "rebuild connectivity" in the netlist window, or just close PCBnew and start it again.
It's far from perfect, but will works.
I've done that on a design recently to swap some pin without going to modify first the Schematics (I'done that after, not perfect, but at that time I didn't wanted to before changing the Schematics)