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I am unable to start my 2010 Macbook Pro. I brought it to the Apple Genius bar and they assured me that the Hard Drive Cable had gone bad so I replaced the cable and I am still facing the flashing question mark of doom when trying to boot my Macbook Pro. Has anyone else encountered this issue? I have troubleshooted utilizing the following apple forum to no avail: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204323
Either just the hard drive is bad, both are bad or the cable you bought is faulty. I often see these where both the cable and drive go bad.
Sadly the recovery partitions copy of Disk Utility can’t fix the boot sectors as the files on the physical disk can’t be open in this case a second partition. You’ll need to find a friend with a Mac that you can connect your system to using Target Disk Mode to your friends system. That way you can run Disk Utility from your friends system. If you don’t have access to a second Mac you could also create an OS install drive so you can use it to boot your system and access Disk Utility from it and then re-install the OS from it. Using these two methods the drive is not being held open so the lower levels of the disk can be accessed. Even still! It might be the disk is damaged beyond hope here. So before you try any repairs see if you can salvage any important files before you scrub the drive. If you need to replace your drive I would recommend going with a SSHD or SSD drive. Both offer better performance than a straight HDD. Here’s more info: macOS Sierra: Transfer files between two computers using target disk modeHow to create a bootable macOS Sierra installer drive
