Where I was going with the "plug and play" is that the WME HDW compatibility
list includes some SATA drives. Not all obviously because the list has not
been changed in a long time, but a SATA is a SATA except newer are SATA300,
and that was a hurdle since my onboard controller didn't want to recognize
it. SG drives, or at least some of them, do not auto shift down speed as all
PATA drives I had come across previously. Such as a DMA100 HDD working with
a slower controller. But the fix was simple enough although poorly
documented. Add a jumper to the "for factory use only" block of pins.

At least one of my NF2 MOBO's acknowledges an issue of some sort. That is
there are big notes that WME can not be installed to a SATA drive. That is
the MSI board. Nothing on CT board. Except that I guess I verified it can
not be done on the CT with the SATA as the boot drive. Everything looks good
until HDW install at which it balks. After several attempts I managed to get
far enough that when in SAFE mode I could see the controllers installed, but
no HDD. Seems WME has a problem recognizing the drive as a "generic IDE
drive TYPE". That does seem weird since if I plug the SATA to an up system,
it immediately recognizes it as a "generic IDE drive type 80". But then the
setting page looks more like for CD/DVDRW.

Guess I can only hope someone comes up with a third party driver or
something like Shane's post.

Norman

"Mike M" wrote in message
...
Why not ask your motherboard manufacturer for help since it is they who
say their mobo supports Win Me. You won't get any help from Microsoft as
Win Me is long out of full support (mid 2004) and also out of extended
support, where only critical security issues are addressed, which ended in
mid 2006.

What you seem to conveniently forget because it doesn't necessarily fit
your agenda is that Win 9x systems were designed in the 90s for the
hardware available at that time when a 400MHz cpu was fast, 256MB of RAM
unusual and drives larger than 40GB or so, rare. Today, of course, such
hardware could barely if at all run XP. Times change as do operating
systems and if you want to use modern hardware then you need to run a more
modern operating system that is more suited to the hardware.
--
Mike Maltby



Norman wrote:

Ouch. I know prug&Prae is better, but is it going to be totally left
to that?

Some sort of disconnect here because my MOBO is compliant to multiple
OS, including the old ones.
It has SATA on board.
It is a SATA HDD.

Almost sounds like, if OS was not designed specifically with that in
mind, fagetaboutit.
And even if it was, if it don't work, we might fix it.
Or wait till next OS.
Or wait till 128bit.
Or gig-a-bit. You know what it is to be gigged-a-bit? ;-)