My MBP cannot find the internal HDD

[Tanax]

Hey everyone!

I'm new to these forums so sorry if this thread is posted in the wrong section, in which case feel free to move it.

To the issue:

My MBP cannot find the internal hdd. At first when I tried booting, the famous "flashing folder with questionmark" appeared. After reading up a bit, I found out that this means the MBP cannot find any OS to load. I booted via the installation CD and tried reinstall the OS but failed as it couldn't find any harddrive to install to. On the apple guide that I was following it said that the most likely reason is that the harddrive is broken(and thus losing all of my data on it) and must be replaced. I was devastated! Lol.

When I bought the MBP, I also upgraded the hdd to a larger one(not an apple hdd) that the apple retail store installed for me and I got the original apple hdd aswell so I already had 2 hdds, one of which I now thought was broken. So I installed the original apple hdd in the MBP, couldn't boot from that either. I found that rather strange that 2 hdds were broken.. so I tried booting from my first hdd via external USB, worked perfectly and all my files were there(you can guess how happy I was that it wasn't the hdd that was broken!).

I called the retail store and asked them for support and told them what I now have told you and they gave me the answer that it is most likely the SATA-cable that is the fault here. It could however be the logicboard, in which case it would be quite a costly matter and it would be better to just buy a new MBP in that case. In any case, they told me to send it in for a repair. Due to my guarantee(or what it's called in english) had expired I had to pay for this. I still haven't sent it in yet because I'm thinking about trying to repair this myself - how hard could it be to replace a cable?

So after this rather lengthy post, what do I want to ask you?
Well, I want to ask for your opinion if you think that it actually could be the SATA-cable that is the fault? I don't want to replace a cable that isn't broken.

Also I want to ask you, is ifixit the only place that sells these cables and is 40$ the standard price for this? I live in Sweden so it would be easier if there were any store in Sweden that sold this - or at least in EU.

And do you know the exact cable that I need? Is it the one on ifixit?

In case you're wondering, I bought this MBP in... Nov '09 so I assume this counts as a mid 2009 model.

 

[Tanax]

Wall of text.. perhaps I scared people away

 

[bozz2006]

Replacing the SATA cable is dead easy. You can follow ifixit's guide HERE. You can also buy the cable from them too, right HERE.

 

[Detrius]

Yes, wall of text. You have about twenty times as much written as you really needed.

Here's your problem summed up in one line: known good hard drive is not recognized inside the machine.

Possible solutions: replace HD cable or replace logic board.

It's far far far more likely to be the cable. It's theoretically possible that it could be the logic board, but it's insanely more likely to be the cable. On some MBPs, it's routed underneath the optical drive, but on most machines, it's a five minute repair.

 

[Tanax]

Yeah, sorry about that. I have a habbit of explaining everything in detail, especially when it comes to hardware problems, perhaps too much detail.

In any case, thank you for the replies! I will order a new cable and replace the old one. Thanks again!