Chosen Solution
This is my son’s mac. He dropped it and told me it worked fine right after. He powered it off and the next day it wouldn’t boot. He gave it to me and I tried the install DVD which doesn’t see the hard disk drive. I removed the drive, plugged it into a SATA-to-USB and plugged that USB into my mac. I can see the drive just fine. I put it back in his mac, reseated the system board end of the cable, but the system wouldn’t boot from it. I put a new, spare drive in his mac. I booted from the install DVD, which didn’t see the new disk. I plugged in his drive via SATA-to-USB, selected it as the startup disk and did a restart. It booted fine from his old drive. I am guessing the only remedy is to replace the system board, but I was hoping for something simpler and less expensive. Anyone?
Here’s the correct hard drive cable for your machine 922-9062: MacBook Pro 13" Unibody (Mid 2009-Mid 2010) Hard Drive Cable http://www.welovemacs.com/mb991lla.html
I would actually try the hard drive cable first. If you pull the cable out, do you notice any tears in it? If you give us the model number, we can point you in the right direction for the hard drive cable.
It was the cable. All fixed.
I got a new cable and it was not fixed, same problem. Both drives are good because they power up in other machines. I got a new cable for this machine and it doesn’t even power up the drive. The SATA controller shows up when I boot from USB though. Not really sure what the problem is.
