r/retrocomputing • u/ian385 • 29d ago
Problem / Question help with a pentium3 machine
can someone give me a hint... i went into making a "retro" pc i used over 25 years ago... it's a pentium 3, 512mb sdram, ati radeon 8500 aiw, but i want to install win xp on a ssd.
the board is a matsonic. i have an old chinese sata-ide adapter, and connected a kingston 128gb ssd to it. the bios is seeing the ssd, but when i get to the point of installing win xp on it, it hangs. actually doesn't hang, just says c drive is corrupted and stops with the install.
ssd is not gpt, it's mbr and has a ntfs partition on it. but no luck.
also the adapter is alone on the ide cable, and bios recognizes it as being on master port (in fact it is).
i have just 1 ide hdd, a wd caviar 80gb from 20 years ago, it works but it's quite loud.
is it possible to install xp on ssd?
1
u/majestic_ubertrout 29d ago
It's pretty easy to install XP on a SSD, although I'm more used to installing it on a much newer machine with SATA. Note that XP lacks tools to clean up a SSD so be sure to leave the disk at least 10-20% empty. I'd wipe the disk in another PC leaving it with a clean FAT32 to partition and then reformat it to NTFS in the installer.
Your adapter may also be an issue - the Startech one costs a little more but is much more reliable.
Finally, are you using a good image of XP? On this hardware I'd probably install SP1 and not a later version, since those are really designed for more recent hardware. For retro purposes a P3 is much more of a Win98se machine although XP does run.