One of WinME's peculiarities is that there is NO REAL MODE SUPPORT in the OS. According to some articles I've seen, WinME is the only system Mickey ever released that can't even make it's own boot floppy because the "DOS" start up is in real mode and the OS blocks copying the real mode files anywhere(?).

The usual method, if you really need real mode, is to use a Win98SE boot floppy -- something that apparently every WinME user should have tucked away somewhere.

Another WinME peculiarity is that it was the first OS Microsoft released that came ONLY on CD, and the CD wasn't bootable. If you had a laptop with only one ext media drive bay, you couldn't boot from the CD to install WinME, and if you booted from the floppy drive you couldn't put the CD in to install it. This was, of course, before "hot-swappable" drives were common in laptops.

There was a workaround for the installation problem, that I've been looking at to see if it really defines the "minimum requirements" to make a CD drive recognizable to WinME. It tells you what is necessary to make the Win98-booted system see the drive; but I haven't figured out enough about what changes the WinME installation may make to tell whether that's the right setup for WinME after the instl is done, or if the WinME installation adds some other necessities.

See it at Cannot Install Windows Millennium Edition on Computer with Only One Removable Drive if you're brave. With the machine at hand, it probably would make better sense than just abstract puzzling about it.

John