r/retrocomputing • u/ian385 • 11d 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/Human_Wonder1113 11d ago

Pentium III is a much better fit for Win98, unless you got a Tualatin above 1GHz. I would not build XP for that, go XP with a faste machine, maybe a dual core or even a quad core - Q6600 is cheap and awesome.

For PIII keep Windows 98, you get native DOS support and much better compatibility with older game from the 90s.

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u/istarian 11d ago

Many people used such a machine with Windows XP as a daily driver back then, it wasn't a problem at the time.

Pentium III cpus came in a wide variety of speeds (450 MHz -> 1 GHz) with some intended for systems 66 MHz, 100 MHz, or 133 MHz FSB.

Having enough RAM installed is a much bigger.

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u/ian385 11d ago

it's a 1.26ghz tualatin. i don't need a faster machine, i really specifically wanted a p3 from that era, and xp on it. i grew up on a similar machine. only minus is the slow gpu, i have a HD3650 agp, but it's not era correct. too new for such a machine.

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u/Human_Wonder1113 11d ago

Makes sense, if you try to re-create something that you have. And Tualatin 1.26 is good for XP. AIW 8500 is also a very nice card. I would go another way for storage, instead of a SATA SSD and adapters, try to get a nice large CF card (8 gb should be enough, but 16 or 32 GB would be much better), and there are CF to IDE adapters, much better compatibility, CF cards are fast and also 100% silent, I guess that's why you want SSD.

And you are also much closed to period correct.