Stylistic tablet not detecting drives

[pentium]

I have a Fujitsu Stylistic ST series tablet which is not behaving with hard drives.
With a drive installed the HDD light will blink when you power the tablet on (it does not do this if no drive is installed), the drive can be heard spinning up and it will blip once again once the POST is complete. However from there you can't boot from the drive. The BIOS also states that no hard disk is present. I tried several drives and reflowed the connector on the drive's ribbon cable (this) and I still can't get a drive to be detected.

[shovenose]

Re: Stylistic tablet not detecting drives

is it really old? How big is the drive? Have you tried a different one?

[kaboom]

Re: Stylistic tablet not detecting drives

Use a BIOS overlay.

WD EZ-Drive or similar.

I've done that on a Compaq LTE5400 dinosaur (max 2.1GB) to use a 20GB HDD. Keep it under 32GB, though. I tried the same with a 40GB and got:

drive can be heard spinning up and it will blip once again once the POST is complete. However from there you can't boot from the drive. The BIOS also states that no hard disk is present

No overlays, though, if the BIOS doesn't see the drive. With the 5400, the BIOS saw the drive, but I don't remember what the 'reported' capacity was.


Ahh... FAT/FAT32 and BIOS limitations, makes me feel old.

[pentium]

Re: Stylistic tablet not detecting drives

It's a 700mhz Pentium 3 Mobile based tablet. It isn't that old.

Also, as stated, yes I have tried multiple hard drives The system will spin them up but the BIOS will not detect them.

[b700029]

Re: Stylistic tablet not detecting drives

I can't imagine why it'd be useful on a tablet, but is there a BIOS option to disable the IDE controller?

Also is there the possibility of getting a 'scope or LA on the pins of the drive?

[pentium]

Re: Stylistic tablet not detecting drives

Actually I have a scope but if I knew what I should be looking for it would be preferred.

Yes the IDE is enabled.

[b700029]

Re: Stylistic tablet not detecting drives

Pinout: http://pinouts.ru/HD/Ata44Internal_pinout.shtml

You should see some activity on the data lines and the read/write strobes. Getting that would mean it's at least trying to detect the drive and communicate with it.

[pentium]

Re: Stylistic tablet not detecting drives

Slightly old BuMP but needed to pot some closure on this.
I got the dock for it (well, not the exact dock but it worked after I chopped off two plastic pegs) and it does not even detect the CD drive in the dock.
If it can't see the drive and it can't see the CD, chances are the IDE is toast. Damn.