Very strange hard drive issue

[JD92]

I was in a lecture the other day and I turned my MBP on, and instead of starting up it gave me a folder with a question mark on it. I tried clearing the NVRAM and PRAM and then tried running the restore DVD but the hard drive didn't come up in disk utility. I tried my PS3's hard drive to see whether it was the hard drive that was faulty or the MBP, and the PS3 hard drive showed up so clearly it must have been a dead hard drive. I ordered a new hard drive and it arrived today so i tried it out but my MacBook Pro still can't see it in either the OS X setup or in disk utility. I thought perhaps this new HDD was faulty so I tried it in my PS3 and it worked absolutely fine. I then tried the PS3 HDD in my MBP again and it showed up in disk utility just as I would have expected.

Anyone got any idea what might be wrong?

 

[greytmom]

Here you go - someone else posted on this, further down the page.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1084799/

 

[JD92]

Thanks for getting back to me

This doesn't explain, though, why a perfectly functional blank hard drive doesn't show up in disk utility or the OS X installer

 

[greytmom]

I'm not techy enough to have a clue. I would imagine you are going to have to take it somewhere and have it diagnosed, but perhaps someone else here will have more insight. You might want to repost with a more descriptive subject title so that it attracts the attention of the right people.

 

[JD92]

Got it sorted - took it to the Genius Bar and they found it was a malfunctioning SATA cable. They replaced it for £12 and now my MacBook Pro is working better than ever with a nice new 500GB HDD I bought for it