MacBook Pro Can't Detect Hard Drives

[Queasy Tiger]

Hi all!

Okay, I'm pretty good with Mac's, especially on the software side, but this one has me completely stumped.

 

I have a MacBook Pro 13 inch late 2012 model laptop running Mac OSX High Sierra, and while on a car ride one day it froze, and I was forced to hard restart it.  

However when I tried to turn it back on, I got the infamous flashing file of death.

"Alright..." I thought "The SATA cable has slipped out of the hard drive again, no biggy right?"  Well this has happened to me on a few occasions before, and each time it has been solved by taking the hard drive out, cleaning the SATA contacts, and then it has worked fine again.  But when I did the same thing on this occasion it had no effect.  

The hard drive is still spinning and working because my other Mac can access the data fine using an external caddy, but I thought maybe it was just an issue with the drives boot capabilities, so I ordered a new SSD to go in it, as I had been meaning to do for a while now, however still, it could not detect my drive when I entered setup using a High Sierra USB boot disk that I made.  It could detect USB just fine, but no SATA!

 

Does anyone have any ideas?

Because there are only 2 more things that I can think of that it might be.

 

The first is that the proprietary SATA cable is faulty, which is a simple £15 - £20 fix...

OR...

The SATA controller on my motherboard has gone bad...

 

Like I said, I usually know what I'm doing, and inbetween this story I have tried many things to try and get this to work, but to no avail! 

 

Please help, I can't afford a new computer ?

[kelvinhall05]

Try a different HDD, then a different cable, and if neither make it work...yeah.

[MkaiL]

I have the same macbook and this happened to me too. I just had to swap out the sata ribbon cable and it worked again. I see many others on forums that had the same problems, looks like a flaw of this model.

[Queasy Tiger]

On 6/16/2018 at 3:31 PM, MkaiL said:

I have the same macbook and this happened to me too. I just had to swap out the sata ribbon cable and it worked again. I see many others on forums that had the same problems, looks like a flaw of this model.

 

On 6/16/2018 at 3:24 PM, kelvinhall05 said:

Try a different HDD, then a different cable, and if neither make it work...yeah.

Hey, sorry.
I forgot I made this thread.
I haven't gotten around to buying a new cable yet, but i'll let you know when I do!

Thanks