Internal HD not showing on Desktop

Litepixels

Registered
Here's my dilemma as briefly as I can tell it.
I have a G4 15" Mac Alum 1.67GHz Powerbook. It's a nice machine and runs well. Last week it went through the xray machine at Honolulu airport for about the 50th time and when I tried to work on it waiting for my flight, the thing wouldn't boot. It just displayed the folder/smileyface/?

Apple in NYC (where I was heading) diagnosed a failed HD, so I ordered a replacement upgrade (Seagate 160GB) and installed it on Wednesday. It still didn't show on the desktop. I tried an OSX DVD to start from there, and using Disk utility on the DVD to scan for the missing new HD. It didn't see it. I then installed OS X Leopard onto a firewire external drive and tried to start the computer.

It booted up and ran just fine from the firewire drive. In fact I'm using it for this email.

I checked with our IT team at my company and they looked at the computer and checked both the old HD and the new one and reported back to me that both were OK and that they could see no obvious damage to the logic board. Both HD's showed up on their test machine. The old one still had all the files and programs I had installed on it.

The motherboard looks unscathed, and there have been no drops other than on to a soft bed from about a foot above the bed on maybe two ocassions. I checked the PRAM backup battery and it's fine, I've reset PRAM and NVram with no success.

Other than a motherboard, the only thing I can think of is the ribbon cable from the Hd to the logic board. Does that sound feasable or is there something I'm missing?

Thanks in advance for your help

Aloha

David
 
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