Originally Posted by Nasty
Windows Me is limited to four ATAPI drives total. This means that if you use an SATA hard drive, you must disable one of the regular PATA ports in the BIOS. And if you're using three or more PATA drives, then you cannot use any SATA drives. (That's because you're already maxed out in ATAPI drive support if you have both PATA ports enabled, and enabling even one SATA port with both PATA ports enabled will exceed the maximum support in Windows Me.)
If you want to use your SATA hard drive in Windows Me, then you will have to lose at least one of your optical/Zip drives. (Unless you use a separate PCI controller card for your SATA hard drive.)
The only Windows operating systems which fully support both your SATA and PATA ports are Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows 2003 Advanced Server. However, getting Windows 2000 to work with more than four ATAPI drives is still rather difficult, requiring manual registry tweaks.