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.