Hard Drive vansihed from Desktop - now I can't boot from it.

Hello
I was doing some repair work on my HD form my external portable USB, all went well. But when finished and picking up my macbook I accidentally pulled out the usb cable on the external drive. When I reboot my macbook from the usb drive I could no longer see the internal HD on the desktop, nor could I see it from system prefs as a bootable drive, the only bootable drive is the usb one.
I started Disk Utility and I could see the HD and run VERIFY & REPAIR disk, but all was green, no issues reported.
So I tried to boot with the option key and both the USB and HD appeared, but when I chose the HD as the startup disk I got the 'no entry sign' and I had to reboot using the USB.
I tried zpping PRAM, I ran a full Techtool suite on the drive and no errors were found, it even found the startup file.
My guess is the path to the startup file/block is gone, but I can't find any way of re-linking it. DU & Techtool can see the drive and it shows up on the HW profile under 'about this mac', but not as a startup volume.
I'm out of options, so I'd really appreciate any help.
My good backup is kinda old, as I was going to buy a bigger backup disk soon. I could zap the backup disk and do a full backup again and see if the backup disk will boot, but I'd like to see if anyone has an idea on how to get the HD enabled as a startup disk first.
thanks
Bronach
macbook
10.6.7
2gb ram
320 HD

I found the answer!!
Even after a visit to the local genius bar I came away empty handed, they did no more than run Disk Utility and got the same results as I did. They we unable to mount the drive. The best they could suggest was to contact a data recovery and keep my fingers crossed as my last incremental TM backup was incomplete due to my external 250 gb filling up.
So I went home feeling glum and realized although I tried TechTool, I had not tried Disk Warrior. And DW came to the rescue I fired it up form my other boot drive and it could see and mount my internal HD immediately. I could even rebuild the directory. When I checked in sys prefs for a startup disk to boot, both my internal and external drive were available. So now I'm booted up on a clean and fast internal HD. Naturally the 1st thing I did was do a full image backup of my drive after wiping my TM backup external drive.
I was a bit disappointed the the genius didn't try DW. But I'm a happy camper that my Mac is alive again. Now off to PC World to buy a 1TB backup drive.
Bronach

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Hard Drive vansihed from Desktop - now I can't boot from it.

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