computer with flash module for hard drive wont get to bios

[mogen317]

hello, i have a fujitsu stylistic 4110 tablet computer. I replaced the 2.5 in hard drive with a 44 pin flash module I purchased here: http://www.memory.com/item.asp?item=TS512MDOM44V

The switch on the module is set to M for master and I've tried the module plugged in both ways (it does not have the missing pin in the middle to determine up vs. down) but the computer never reaches the bios screen. The power light goes on and the screen back light turns on but the screen remains blank. With no hard drive plugged in at all the bios loads and says no operating system.

any ideas on why this might be happening?

[rcrsn51]

Is there a partition on the flash drive that is formatted and flagged bootable? To find out, I would launch Puppy off the live CD and run a partition manager like GParted. Also, I would check your BIOS settings to see if it has auto-detected this device. On the other hand, it sounds like your BIOS isn't starting at all, which is certainly a problem.

What if you took this device to another machine and plugged it in as slave drive? That would at least tell you if it was functioning. [Edit] But since this is a 44 pin laptop-style unit, that may not be possible without an adapter.

[Runemaster]

It is possible that your bios does not support booting from a removable media source since in this case it is a flash card. look in the boot sequence and see if you can find an option that says removable and if there is one then set it preferably to the first option. generally older bios don't support removable media booting since flash memory didn't come into play as a flash drive until the ladder part of the 90's and since nothing was small enough to fit on a 1.44meg floppy many bios makers didn't include this option in the boot sequences you may be able to flash the bios with and update if you can find one to see if it supports removable media booting.