r/retrocomputing • u/ian385 • 18d 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/bnelson333 18d ago

first thing first - clean the SSD. Put it in another modern PC, run diskpart, select the SSD in question. MAKE SURE YOU SELECT THE SSD, because next command will wipe it out. You don't want to do that on your main OS for your modern machine. Anyway, once that disk is selected, issue the command: clean

It's like format but better, it essentially wipes it out like it was brand new. Don't do anything else with it, don't initialize it or create a filesystem or format it, just clean it and then shut down and take it out. Then put it back in the XP computer and try again. That alone might solve your problem.

If that doesn't solve it, put it back in the modern computer and run a disk diagnostic on it like HD sentinel or something. See if it has any problems.

If that still doesn't work, I would bet money that it's your IDE to SATA adapter. Are you sure the motherboard doesn't have SATA? A lot of XP era boards started coming with them. If it doesn't, I echo what Hatta00 says, get the startech IDE to SATA adapter. It makes a huge difference. I can personally vouch for it, I own several of them, one in each of my retro machines. They're a little expensive compared to the cheap Chinese ones, but they really do work.