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The 128 gb SSD's are a great size for replacing HDD's in legacy systems. Systems with IDE ports or OS's like NT/98/2k and sometimes XP or systems with 137 gb motherboard BIOS limits. These Patriot 128 GB SSD's seem to be the only 128 gb drives that are still widely available, Lexar and Kingston don't seem to sell them any more. And now these Patriot drives suck and can't be used on these old systems.

Ok I have an update. Summary: On 2 different systems, the Patriot P210 128 gb SSD is not visible / accessible to the running OS if the SATA port is set to IDE mode. Details - system 1: I have Win-7 Pro SP1 installed on a WD800JB 80-gb IDE hard drive on an IBM Thinkcenter PC (this box would date to around 2004/2005 but Win-7 was installed probably 2015). The motherboard has an IDE connector and a couple of SATA connectors. The motherboard naturally is not UEFI. In the BIOS setup of this PC is this: Devices IDE Drives Setup - Parallel ATA: Primary or Disabled - Serial ATA: Enable or Disable - Native mode operation: Automatic or Serial ATA Printed on-screen for that last option is this help description: "Choose which channels will be placed in Native mode. In Automatic mode, only the serial channel is placed in Native mode, and only if necessary. Note: Some OS do not support native mode." With the "native mode operation" set to Automatic, the Patriot SSD is not detected by Win-7. I wait for 10 minutes and Win-7 has not detected the drive. I go into Device manager and Disk manager, the drive is not there. I reboot, go into the bios, and change "native mode operation" to Serial ATA, reboot the box, and Windows detects new hardware, installs something and then the Patriot SSD is visible, but not initialized. I have to choose MBR or GPT first to be able to do anything in Disk Manager, but I don't do anything at this point because I've established that a bios setting does influence the visibility of this SSD under Win-7 SP1. Again I suspect that this is the fundamental IDE vs AHCI issue. IBM seems to refer to AHCI as "native mode Serial ATA". Details - system 2: A socket 775 Intel based motherboard, no IDE interface on the board, it has a floppy drive interface and 6 sata connectors. Windows XP pro SP3 is installed on a 500 gb Seagate sata HDD. In the bios the SATA mode is set to IDE. Attaching the Patriot SSD and powering up, the SSD is not visible to XP. It doesn't show up in Drive management or Device Manager. Disconnecting the XP drive and booting Norton Ghost 2003 from a floppy same thing - no drives detected. Change the SATA setting in the bios to AHCI, re-attach the XP drive, yes XP boots up - because I had already installed the SATA drivers for XP. But YES - the Patriot SSD is now visible. Reboot with the Ghost floppy - yes, Ghost sees the SSD. Now - I clone the 500 gb XP HDD to the 128 gb Patriot SSD using Ghost. The XP drive is only using about 8 gb of drive space, so this is possible, destination volume is re-sized. Clone is made, AND it boots. The 128 gb Patriot SSD does boot just fine into XP. There is something different about these Patriot SSD's that nobody will ever see if they are attached to a sysem with UEFI bios or with SATA ports set to AHCI. These drives can't be used to make clone backups of old / legacy systems or used with IDE-SATA convertor boards on systems that don't have SATA ports.

I remember maybe 10 years ago when there was talk of hard drives moving to 4k sector size (from 512 byte sector size) if that was going to be a problem for the older windows versions. I'm just wondering if the problems I'm seeing today with some Patriot P210 128 gb SSD's could be because they have 4k sectors and it's a complete fluke that these are the first drives I've ever putzed with on win-XP systems to have 4k sectors. I have plenty of SSD's and HDD's that are about 5 years old (128 gb SDD's and 1TB HDD's, all sata, all used in IDE mode) that I've been able to use under Win-XP (and Win-NT4 and Win-98) and have never even thought about the 4k sector issue before.

Can you select IDE mode for the sata interface on UEFI motherboards? Or are the sata ports going to automatically be in AHCI mode and you have no choice? For those that have a windows system where their SATA drives are already running in AHCI mode (as set in the BIOS setup menu), it probably isin't easily testable to change the setting to IDE mode and still have the OS boot up properly. Unless you can change the SATA ports to IDE mode (or at least the SATA ports on a secondary controller or individual channel) then you can't test for the situation I'm describing with these Patriot SSD's. If you're running Win-XP or possibly 7 natively (ie not in a VM) and you're running it on a system where the SATA ports are set to IDE mode, then you are perfectly set up to test the compatibility of these Patriot drives. If I'm right, and these Patriot P210 drives require AHCI sata mode, then these would be the first SATA drives *EVER* to have this requirement / handicap.

Looking at Patriot's website just now, is there a reason why they'd be saying that the OS compatability for these SSD's only goes down to Win-7? O/S Supported: Windows® 7*/8.0*/8.1/10 Note the * for Win-7/8.0 what's that supposed to indicate? What's changed between XP and 7 regarding SSD / sata drives? This particular drive isin't huge - it's not like it's a 2 or 4 tb drive. It's only 128 gb. Edit: Just now I'm seeing this on reddit: "Yea so patriot kinda changed something with their “newer” drives. They used to work with no changes to bios, ide mode and all regular, now they don’t. You sadly need to get a new ssd for it to work. The Kingston 240 gig works." and "I have the exact same drive and the exact same issue. I have another ssd, Lexar, and that one works perfectly. The Patriot ironically worked perfectly for win98 but WinXP won’t recognize it no matter what I do. Tried playing with modes, used a m/b F6 disk - nothing." Those 2 comments were posted in the same r/windowsxp thread 3 months ago...

I've connected a lot of SATA drives to various motherboards over the years and have never seen this behavior before. I recently bought a 10-pack of Patriot 128 gb SSD's and none of them are "visible" on a PC running Win-XP. They show up in the BIOS as the system boots, but they don't show up in device manager or disk manager. XP boots from a 500 gb sata drive on this system, and other 128 GB drives (Lexar and Kingston) are seen no problem. The motherboard is an Intel socket-775 based CPU, sata interface on the board, no IDE interface at all. But in the BIOS I can select IDE, RAID, or AHCI for the sata mode, I have it set to IDE. When I want to clone hard drives I will use Norton Ghost 2003 (booted from a floppy) - but not in this case because Ghost can't see these SSD's either. I've booted an old version of Acronis from a CD (and Clonezilla also from CD) and they can see these drives. On another PC running Win-10, yes these drives are seen and can be initialized / formatted. So why can't XP (and Ghost) see these 128 GB SSD's ? Are there any tools I can download somewhere that can read exactly what's on these drives as they come out of the package, and maybe set a few magic bytes somewhere in a boot sector or MBR and correct this situation?

Here's the situation. I've got a BX-440 Intel P3 motherboard (probably dates to 1995 - 1999 time frame). I believe originally that win-98 was installed on it, then Win-2k was added. When booting, there is a boot menu. Original hard drive was maybe a few gb in size. Over time the drive was cloned to larger and larger drives, and partions were resized. Currently it has 3 FAT-12 partitions (each 4 gb in size) and an NTFS partion where Win-2k was installed. This motherboard has IDE sockets, no sata, and the drives were IDE up until a few years ago, when I cloned the last IDE drive (80 gb) to a 128 gb SSD. I have a small board that plugs into the IDE motherboard slot and converts it to SATA, so the SSD is connected to that board. It works fine. The motherboard probably has a 137 gb hard drive size limitation. Recently I wanted to clone the SSD, so I brought it to another PC that has SATA ports and booted Ghost 3 from a floppy. The 128 gb SSD was the source drive, and a 250 gb sata hard drive (some old WD hard drive I had, new still in mylar bag, circa 2007) was the destination drive. In Ghost I adjusted the NTFS partition on the destination (made it the same size as the source) my intention being that only the first logical half of the 250 gb drive was going to be used to keep everything under the 137 gb boundary. The cloning went well, but when booting the clone drive on the old motherboard the Win-2k splash screen froze soon after it came up. Next what I did is to perform the cloning on the old motherboard (with IDE interface using IDE-to-Sata mini converter boards). The original cloning took 1/2 hour, but it took 2 hours on the old motherboard. But guess what - the clone drive now boots! I'd like to know what I can do differently, if anything, when cloning a 128 gb drive to a larger drive (larger than 137 gb) while keeping the logical size under the 137 gb limit (using Ghost booted from a floppy). When the drives are SATA that is. My experiment of doing that on an old motherboard with IDE interface and using IDE-to-SATA converter did work, but it's slow.

Ok, I figured it out. Even though I had enabled "simple file sharing" on the XP machine, the problem was with the guest account. Simple file sharing uses the guest account. I had changed the name of the guest account from "guest" to "somethingguest". Now, I don't know if simply changing the guest account name was the problem, or maybe I put a password on the guest account, but to remedy the situation I did 2 things: 1) remove any existing password that the "somethingguest" account might have had by resetting the password (and leaving it with no password) 2) create a new account with the name "guest", with no password, and making it a member of guest users. Then I went back to the Win-7 pc and manually mapped the network drive of the XP machine (//ip/share-name) and immediately the shared folder came up, no prompts for name/password. Now I might go turn off the telephony service on XP and see if that does anything...

I've got a Win-7 SP1 Ultimate 32-bit system that has been able to access a folder on a win-98 system with no problems for a long time. I don't think I have any user-name/password set, or if I do, it happens automatically when I want to read/write files on the 98 system from the win-7 system. I have a the win-98 share mapped to a virtual drive on the win-7 system. Offhand I don't recall what I had to do to get things working that way, but it works. I probably had to manually enter the //server/share as /IP-Address-of-98-system/share-folder because browsing for it turns up nothing. I'm trying to achieve the same thing with an XP-pro system. Share a folder on the XP system, map that folder to a virtual drive on the win-7 system. I've gotten as far as entering the //server/share as //ip/share-folder and it seems to find it but I'm asked for user-name/pw. I enter the admin username and PW but it says the PW is wrong. I have the share on the XP set as everyone full access, I don't see anywhere in any of the folder properties or share properties how to specify a share user-name/pw or de-select those credentials. I have turned off completely the XP firewall (unless there is more than 1 check-box needed to pull that off). Until I did that, I couldn't even ping the XP box. I'm confused about Win-7 support for SMB 1.0/CIFS File Sharing Support. I've come across instructions that I should see "Enable SMB 1.0/CIFS File Sharing Support" in the Windows 7 features add/remove list, but I don't see it. I don't know if SMB-1 is key to this issue or a red herring. I note that up until now, I did not have on the Win-7 system, in this key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\LanmanServer\Parameters The SMB1 dword value, which I have just added and set to 1. I haven't re-booted the win-7 system yet to test if that makes any difference. Assuming that I did not have SMB1 enabled, then I guess that SMB1 is NOT used when win-7 is accessing a shared folder on a win-98 machine? At another site I have a win-7 PC that can access shared folders on a Win-2k server and Win-NT4 server, so I don't know why I'm having so much trouble today getting this working for XP. In all cases, it's the Win-7 machine that is accessing the shared folder on the other machine, not the other way around. Anyone been here before? Edit: I tend to turn off A LOT of services on the machines I use. In this case I'm not so much worried about the win-7 pc as the XP machine. I did have the "Telephony" service disabled, I have enabled it, I don't know if that helped. I am curious about the Telephony service and is it needed for file-sharing on XP. I can find no satisfactory explanation as to if that services plays any role in file sharing (or in general what the heck needs it anyways?).

I've got a few of those motherboards, I might have 4 still in un-opened condition. I did create an XP installation hard drive, fully updated, validated and ready to go, for when I might want to get a few of them up and running. And yes, I did discover that they're limited to only 2 gb max ram, which does suck. I think I did get win-98 working ok on them, maybe not the sound part. What is "Windows ALL" ?

Yes, this system was built from Windows 7 Ultimate, SP1, 32-bit (on a laptop with only 4 gb ram). The install image was built from SP1 with a carefully selected set of updates/patches rolled in (I think I used Nlite?) back in the fall of 2016, with auto-updating turned of, windows defender turned off. No MS updates installed since then. There was not a lot of trust with MS back then, with their underhanded ways to force migration to win-10 and also the telemetry stuff. On this same system I recently dealt with an issue where in explorer I couldn't right-click on a set of files to bring up the context menu if the selection included a zip file. I posted about that here, and found a solution that included a couple new reg entries.

I currently have 5 spreadsheets open, but they are all based on the same "instance" of excel. I've created them by going file, new, worksheet. They show up on the taskbar as 5 individual, accessible worksheets. And as I've said, I can't seem to drag anything to them, or a new worksheet, without the mouse turning into a red circle. Now, if from the taskbar I right-click on the top / main excel icon, and select "Microsoft Excel", a new excel window opens, perhaps this is a new instance of excel, and I *can* drag files to this new instance and the contents get dumped into the sheet as expected. On the taskbar, this seems to be just another sheet, tacked onto the end of the other sheets. I think that because I've saved the contents of the other sheets to their own xls file, that even by selecting "file, new, worksheet" that it doesn't qualify as a new / un-named sheet and it won't allow dragging a file into it. But it's wierd - I *can* drag a file from Everything to an existing worksheet, and it gets dumped into a excel as a new worksheet. But I can't do this from exporer unless it's a new instance of excel.

I do this a lot on my win-98 systems but don't use excel a lot in this particular win-7 PC. I have Office 2000 installed on this PC (I don't think the Excel version matters, but anyways...) and I've just tried to drag a log file over to an open Excel spreadsheet and the minute the mouse is over the sheet area the icon turns into a red circle with a line through it, indicating it doesn't like being there I guess. If I drag the file to the Excel title bar area it doesn't turn into a red circle, it turns into a little plus (+) symbol but releasing the mouse there does nothing - excel doesn't open the file. Now if I use a program like the file-finding program "Everything", if I drag the same file from the Everything window over to excel, the file opens into the spreadsheet as expected. Does anyone have an explanation for this? Or a solution?

My understanding of this certificate mechanism is fuzzy. Does a browser (any browser?) running under Win-7 (or any Win version) query a Microsoft certificate database each/every time the browser is pointed to a site to get an answer back if the site/domain is trusted? Or, is this a static update of some sort? Something that gets downloaded only once and does not mean your computer/browser is always in contact with MS with regard to these certs?

I tried the following, on a win-7 system and also a win-10 system that were both showing this behavior: internet properties / security tab / local intranet / sites - uncheck "automatically detect intranet network" local intranet / custom level / miscellaneous section - drag and drop or copy and paste files (enable) - launching programs and unsafe files (enable) The above did not change anything. I then found this: https://www.thewindowsclub.com/these-files-cant-be-opened-in-windows Which had the following reg edits (done from an administrative command prompt): reg add "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Associations" /v "DefaultFileTypeRisk" /t REG_DWORD /d "1808" /f reg add "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Attachments" /v "SaveZoneInformation" /t REG_DWORD /d "1" /f And that DID fix the issue. On both systems. A reboot was not required. It's really confusing why right-clicking on a zip file on a network share comes back with a security message warning of "opening" the file. I'm not trying to open the file when I right-click on it to bring up the context options. Why is that such a big security issue? (on both systems, I think that winrar was the default handler for zip files, would that make a difference here?)