Hard Drive Not Recognized

I'm running Mountain Lion on a mid-2009 MacBookPro 13".

I have a 128gb SSD.

Recently when I booted up my laptop, I got the flashing question mark.

I then tried booting from a USB drive with the recovery disk on it.

When I was in the recovery menu, it cannot recognize my hard disk. The only disk I see is the Mac OS X Base System. I cannot reinstall the OS, because it doesn't show my hard drive as an option for reinstall.

But I have removed the hard drive, placed it into an external enclosure and it works. I was able to remove my key files from the drive, and read everything that was on it with no issues when using it externally on another Mac.

I'm not sure what's wrong or how to fix it.
I have 2 questions, how do I get my Mac to recognize my hard drive?

And 2, am I able to make a time machine backup of my hard drive while using it on another mac externally?

Did the 128GB SSD come with the MBP or did you install it? It could be the ribbon cable died from the Logicboard to the drive.

G'day and welcome to the forums.

Can't help with T as prefer SuperDuper to make a clone of the hDD. Have you tried another drive in the MBP as it sounds like the SATA cable has failed. With heat they get extremely brittle.

dtravis7 said:

Did the 128GB SSD come with the MBP or did you install it? It could be the ribbon cable died from the Logicboard to the drive.

Click to expand...

It was the original hard drive from 2009 when I ordered it.

Are these cables repairable? Are they expensive to fix? Can I do it myself.

It sucks the warranty ran out 3 months ago.

I've never touched the hard drive until today when I removed it.