Flashing Folder w/? And/or hard drive failure - I need step "12" Please.

Late 2011 MBP running latest OS Mavericks
I'm going to cut to the chase and I hope everyone will understand that I am beyond the "basic" steps of rebuild, format and re-install.
In the Last couple of weeks, My MacBook Pro intermittently would show a folder with a ? Mark when rebooted or started up. I followed instructions found here and would be able to get it to work and boot Mavericks just fine. I tried and successfully reset the pram. I reloaded from a time machine backup, but still I would get a random occurrence of the flashing question mark in the folder.
So I decided to go ahead and buy a new hard drive.
I installed it and through the usual prompts through my external drive time machine backup I used disk utility I began to format the new hard drive installed in the MBP. As I was trying to name the new hard drive it disappeared from the disc utility hard drive choices, crazy right? I rebooted and tried again with DU. It did not recognize the hard drive.
So I reinstalled the old hard drive, rebooted and I get the flashing folder with question mark. (I even reinstalled an older, older hard that worked fine 6months ago and it was not recognized.)
To recap:
Current hard drive, brand new harddrive, & older, older hard drive (still running OSX Mavericks.) all create the flashing folder with question mark upon startup.
No matter what I have tried from all of your awesome diagnosis here on support, I cannot find an answer for my situation. No matter what I try, and I have tried every suggestion I could find.
I have "re-, re-, & re-fill-in-the-blank" possible. But in most cases I can only get so far because there is no hard drive that I can find.
It is this simple, there is no target HD for me to "Re" anything to. My MBP doesn't see any of them. Disk utility sees the connected external drive I am booting from (time machine), but cannot see any other HD, I have tried.
So here I am hoping someone can help me with step "12". Or help me to see that I messed step 3.1.
In all sincerity, thanks in advance for any help.

This solved the problem. Thanks for pointing out that sometimes it can be a "hard" not "soft" ware issue. I found a cable on Amazon for $30.00. It was easy to replace and everthing seems good!

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Flashing Folder w/? And/or hard drive failure - I need step "12" Please.

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