Macbook Pro 2009 - No Detection of Internal Hard Disk

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Basically it seems as though the apple equivalent of bios/firmware cannot detect my internal hard drive.
i have tried multiple hard drives - the original installed hard drive and the one i was using at the time. i can boot both drives via usb by docking them to a seagate Goflex base and they work perfectly fine.
i have checked internal conections and there seems to be no issues. i installed my current harddrive in and attempted to boot after my succesful usb boot but no success.
Booting from osx 10.6 install cd : disk did not show in disk utilities or in system profile. However this is what i find even stranger - i inserted an ubuntu 11.04 live cd and succesfully booted to the live enviroment.... and lo and behold the disk was there and i mounted it sucesfully and could read files (this is whilst the HDD is installed in the macbook pro)
I was using the computer just 2 hours ago and it was fine. Now it is unusable.
I have tried resetting the SMC (i think thats what its called??) but i am unsure if i did it correctly!
Any help would be greatly appreciated!! :) Got some very important study notes on there! ( i have backups of course thouh but i use scrivener and they havnt finished the windows version yet!!)
Thanks for reading :)
 

chscag

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2017 27" iMac, 10.5" iPad Pro, iPhone 8, iPhone 11, iPhone 12 Mini, Numerous iPods, Monterey
A SMC reset has nothing to do with the startup disk. Try resetting the PRAM - NVRAM instead. That is where the startup disk information is stored.
 
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Tried that. Still not detecting Hard disk. When i hold down option key on startup there is no internal hard disk shown.
 
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I checked with a stethoscope if the hard disk is spinning up whilst installed internally and it was. if left by itself then after a while it shows the folder with the question mark indicating it cannot locate the file system
 

chscag

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Next thing to check would be the cable that goes from the HD connector to the logic board. Those cables are always suspect since they undergo heat and become brittle. The only positive way to check out that cable is to replace it.
 

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