TiBook interesting HDD issue

I have a Titanium 800mhz Powerbook. I am able to boot from external drives fine (os 9 on an external usb drive and target firewire booting my leopard powerbook) as well as the internal combo drive. I cannot however boot from the internal harddrive.

The drive is known to be good. It will boot in a USB enclosure to OS 9 but I don't even hear it spinning up when booting it internally. I purchased a replacement cable from pbparts.com (took him 3 tries to send the right one) and it will not work.

I tried apple hardware test, no errors.

Any ideas or is this thing toast?

ChrisMan287 said:

How do you know that the drive is good? It doesn't sound like its good to me.

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Sorry reading back that wasn't clear. If I take out the drive and put it into an enclosure, it boots.

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mike457 said:

If you boot from Leopard in the DVD drive, does it offer the hard drive as a possible place to install? Can you access the hard drive from Disk Utility on the Leopard disk?

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The drive is not accessible from my external leopard drive nor is it from an install disc. I don't even understand how I was able to boot leopard I didn't think this computer was capable, it's only 800mhz.

California said:

Have the vaguest of recollections that the hard drive socket on the board can go bad. Try cleaning it and inspecting it, making double sure your hard drive connector orange thingie is good. I actually might have a connector, stumbled on some old parts today. I'll look.

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How would you clean it... can of air? The connector is very small abut it looks intact. Like I said it took three tries to get the right one and it looked quite used when I finally did so maybe the flex cable is bad. Apparently some connectors take a left turn towards the IDE socket and some turn right. I need a rightie (looking on top of the drive with the battery compartment away from you).

If you have one you know to be good and you don't need it, I would be happy to buy it off of you. Are you in the US?

No worries! Thanks for looking!