I am planning to buy a second hard disk for my Win 95 PC, which is 4 years old, for back up purposes. My current HD is 6 GB. Is there a limit on the total hard disk size that Win 95 can support? and how do i check if my current PC hardware can accomodate a second hard disk? thanks

Also, would some certain hard disks be incompatible with Win 95, for some reasons?

The problem with Win95 is not so much the hard drives size but the fact that Win95 has a maximum partition size of 2GB. So if you purchase a 40GB drive you will have to split it up into 20 2gb partitions (drives).

Huh? Win95B and onward supports large disks (more than 2 Gb, FAT32)- not sure what the upper limit is, but it doesn't go by 'totals' - each drive is independant. You can have as many as 4 drives connected on any (typical) machine with 2 EIDE connectors as primary and secondary master & slave (CD-ROM counts as a drive though).

OOOPs brain cramp. Jboy is correct of course! Original Win95 and Win95A are Fat16 Win95B and Win95C are Fat32 compatible You 'might' run into a minor problem with your Bios limitation. It might have an 8gb or 32GB limit but that can be overcome with an overlay program from the drive manufacturer. All hard drives are pretty standard and compatibility should not be a problem.

you need to think about this as well. on an older board like that yourt MOBO may not recognize large drive (in excess of 10 GB). Might want to flash your bios and see what it can see.

I have to agree that the motherboard and bios would be the place to start your research. I have heard that any bios dated before 1992 will not support anything over 8Gig without using overlay software. And not sure flashing would help it. My suggestion before you invest in a bigger hard drive: invest in a newer motherboard/bios and then install at least win98SE(full version/not upgrade). That way you will be sure there will be no problems you run into once you've dumped a couple hundred for a hard drive you can't return.