Why is my MBP not detecting my HDD/Optical Drive?

Question

I've had a second hard drive in one of those optibay things in my MBP 5,1. It's been super awesome, until it stopped getting detected today.

The second hard drive is getting power and is spinning up, but is not being detected at all. I've made sure the SATA connector is on tight and even clean all the connectors with some compressed air. The second hard drive does not show up in Disk Utility or System Profile.

I swapped out the original second hard drive with another hard drive I had laying around and that one didn't get detected either. I even placed my optical drive inside and it won't get detected either.

I plugged the two hard drives into a USB enclosure and they both get detected. I've also reset the PRAM and NVRAM.

When running the Snow Leopard DVD in the external enclosure, I wasn't able to detect the second hard drive in Disk Utility.

What can I do to fix this? Could Lion be doing something fishy? Is it the logic board?

Answer 1

A quick check I would suggest is to launch the terminal and check if the OS can see the HDD.

$ diskutil list

This will list the HDD's and their partitions. This should bypass any finder issues.

Answer 2

I have the same problem and found this answer. Its probably the logic board. http://www.ifixit.com/Answers/View/58398/

Answer 3

The troubleshooting theory in me would want to try a different optibay to try to eliminate variables. If the optipay is verified good, then something on the logic board could be the problem. These are tough issues because Apple's ASD/AHT tools won't be of much use since its a modified hardware situation.

Answer 4

Based on the troubleshooting you've performed so far, all signs point to the logic board being faulty.

If possible, check that the optibay is good by connecting to another system. However, since two known good HDD's and an optical drive fail to be picked up, I'm pretty certain it's the logic :(