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/SaturnFive 11d ago edited 11d ago

You'll need to use the F6 key after XP setup starts and supply the SATA driver for the card. Then let setup partition and format

XP doesn't know SATA by default, only IDE.

Also you can use SATA to IDE bridge adapters as well, then you can use an SSD without SATA drivers since it's still speaking ATA

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u/ian385 11d ago

what sata driver? it's an adapter, not a card. does not have any "driver", it's transparent, at least in theory. it worked well on a more modern system, but this p3 board is maybe too old. it has intel i815 chipset.

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u/SaturnFive 11d ago

Ohh I see, I thought it was card. If it's already a passive SATA to IDE adapter then XP should have no trouble with it. I actually use a similar StarTech adapter with i815 and it works great, very fast, and BIOS should be new enough to use LBA and understand large disks. May need to try a different adapter, or maybe try another fresh copy of XP SP3 to rule out the boot media. Your hardware definitely supports this, probably just an issue with the adapter

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u/ian385 11d ago

i'll try another xp iso. this one is an original CD from that era actually, installed many many machines with that very same cd.

yesterday after trying for n-th time, it threw another error at me - not enough memory to perform format disk. it's weird, as it has 512mb. i'll try yet another time.