These are the steps to follow and it’s important to ensure that the correct disk is selected, otherwise, you will end up in a world of pain. So with that in mind and knowing that my Crucial SSD had been used in a modern machine with UEFI and set up as GPT, I connected it to a new PC running Windows 10 and opened a command prompt as administrator. Without going into the finer details of MBR vs GPT, suffice to say that out of the two partition structures, Windows XP will only recognise your hard drive if it is initialised to MBR. Frankly, it’s more dangerous crossing the road nowadays.
I have a couple of very old PCs, one of which I cobbled together a couple of months ago based on a Pentium 4 3.0 GHz socket 478 on an Intel D865GBF motherboard (March 2003) which just happens to have two SATA ports, making a Windows XP installation to SSD an easy task.Īnd by the way, don’t listen to all the naysayers who say it’s dangerous to install XP in 2021 and that the moment you connect to the Internet, hordes of demons will be unleashed unto the world. Why on earth would anyone want to install Windows XP in this day and age, let alone on an SSD? My answer is - why not? If you’re a tech enthusiast and more particularly if you have an interest in retro PCs, then this should be right up your street.
