[Mechhead]

I have a old Compaq Presario 9546 Computer and I was wondering if I could use it to test and clean hard drives. It has Windows 95 and I think a 256 processor. I have 8 old hard drives ranging from 4.1 Gigs. to 160 Gigs. any help would be appreciate it. Thanks Mechhead

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Windows 95 has a hard limit of 32Gb for the size of the drive.
It does not see FAT32 or NTFS formatted partitions unless you have Windows 95 OSR/2 (4.00.950b or 4.00.950c), even with OSR/2 NTFS support is non-existant.

Computers of the time of Windows 95 typically couldn't see hard drives over 8Gb anyway so I dare say the answer to your question is no, unfortunately.

[Neil Jones]

Windows 95 has a hard limit of 32Gb for the size of the drive.
It does not see FAT32 or NTFS formatted partitions unless you have Windows 95 OSR/2 (4.00.950b or 4.00.950c), even with OSR/2 NTFS support is non-existant.

Computers of the time of Windows 95 typically couldn't see hard drives over 8Gb anyway so I dare say the answer to your question is no, unfortunately.

[Kemasa]

It depends on what exactly you want to do. You can use DBAN, which can boot from a floppy, to wipe the disk, which would also test the disk. It may or may not work on the machine, but it is worth a try.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/dban/

[dsenette]

you could also use any version of a live boot CD (linux or otherwise) to do all your diagnostics and cleanup (i use UBCD4WIN...bootable windows disk)....

[Neil Jones]

you could also use any version of a live boot CD (linux or otherwise) to do all your diagnostics and cleanup (i use UBCD4WIN...bootable windows disk)....

Boot from CD support was very hit-and-miss in the days of Windows 95. Just because a computer had the option to boot from CD didn't mean it was going to.
Windows 95 came initially on one floppy disk and then you could get the bulk of the files off the CD, but the Win95 CD itself was not bootable.

[dsenette]

right....the 95 disk wasn't bootable...but IN THEORY the computer can still boot from CD...since any live cd is bootable