macbook pro sata issues?

[sampers]

Hello eveyone,

I'm hoping to fix my brothers macbook pro 5,3 (2,53Ghz 15" mid 2009).
The machine didn't work anymore after coming back from sleep, it froze so he did a hard shut down. I tried everything to recover, after that to reinstall, but the hard disk didn't do everything as it should. when i tried in single user mode, i couldn't get to the 'terminal'. I was unable to format using disk utility, the disk wouldn't unmount, etc. it looked to me the disk was broken. I have an external casing with data disk in it on with i installed os X lion. works great, no issues. And (to me) surprisingly fast over a single usb port.

But when i now try to put that disk in the macbook pro, it doesn't work. there was the blinking question mark on the folder, so i tried some other things, and sometimes when i now boot the external working disk on usb, and leave the original disk in, it is getting recognized. but it freezes when i try to anything with it.

the external disk is a western digital blue 500. and now i thought maybe the EFI was outdated, but when i download from the apple page, it won't upgrade because it isn't the right version. when i look to system profiler it states the macbook is a 5,4...

any thoughts? i'm getting lost on this one, can the data cable be broken? or the motherboard in such a way that it actually works, only not the hdd data connection?

thanks!

 

[sampers]

anyone a clue?

can it be that the harddrive cable is busted? it's the '821-0812-a'

is there a way to test this? or is it possible only that connector is bad on the motherboard?

 

[sampers]

Does anyone have a clue?

here is a screenshot from when i boot the leopard install DVD and view the diskutil list in terminal.
disk0 was a SD card with the lion installer i made.
disk1 was the leopard DVD
disk2 to 5 are when my newly installed os X lion on external disk was inserted into the macbook pro.

how come it has this layout en doesn't show the 500gigabyte?

 

[thundersteele]

I think OSX can boot from the external drive. I.e. you could try to boot with the internal HD removed and the external with the OSX installation connected via USB.

If that works, then maybe the internal cable is broken, as you already suspected.

 

[sampers]

yeah, that is working, maybe my start post wasn't really clear.
but now the computer is fully operational from the external disk, so now i'm wondering why it doesn't internally

btw; thanks for the reply!