[Wiltshire] Has anybody had laptops that refuse to speak to any SATA hard disk?

[Simon Iremonger]

I have this bizarre problem.. I wonder if John or anybody else
   recognizes this ? --

HP dv2000 Laptop machine, with Fujitsu (uugh!) SATA 2.5" hard disk...

...Had some kind of corruption/dataloss type problem -- but there was
   no problem recovering the data using a desktop machine with SATA
   cable... and I thought I found write-errors / sector errors that
   have gone a way by doing a full w/r badblocks scan on the disk.

I... replaced the disk with a new Seagate disk... (expecting that
   this is the usual case of disk failure given that I also had
   trouble with the disk AND a previous technician declared there
   to be hard disk problems).
I am finding that the laptop will NOT see either the old or new
   SATA disk, despite resetting CMOS and reseating connectors etc.
   - the disk appears to spin-up but just not be 'seen' by the BIOS.

The machine seems to work -- could use it from a USB-disk or
   flash-card or CD etc... -- it just won't see any SATA hard
   disks!!!

Does anybody recognize this particular sort of weirdness at all?

Thanks,
--Simon