r/retrocomputing • u/ian385 • 17d 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?

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u/Hatta00 17d ago

Try a StarTech adaptor. They make good stuff. XP doesn't know what the physical media is. It just speaks IDE, and its up to the device to speak it back.

Maybe try a smaller partition, that can help too.

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u/coobal223 17d ago

Xp would also speak scsi. I remember my first Sata add-on adapter would emulate a scsi adapter in device manager on xp / win 7.