MBP 13" Won't Boot, Gray Screen w/ ? Folder, Hard Drive is perfectly fine

I have a 13" Macbook Pro that won't boot up. When I used my install disk to get to disk utility, it did not recognize that there were any drives in the computer.
I tried:
Removing the hard drive and plugging it into another computer using a SATA to USB adapter. It worked fine and I could see all of the files on the hard drive. I ran the disk utility on another Mac to see if there were errors. It found none. I then restarted the other Mac and selected to boot from the USB drive and it booted perfectly fine. I tried reconnecting and seeing if it would boot now for some reason (machines are funny like that). It didn't; same problem.
Next, I tried:
Installing a different hard drive to see if the disk utility program would see it. It did not.
Then, I tried:
Connecting the original hard drive to the defective Mac using the SATA to USB adapter and trying to boot from USB. This worked fine.
Conclusions so far:
-The Hard Drive is 100% ok
-The Hard Drive Cable MAY be defective
-If the Hard Drive Cable is not at fault, there MAY be a problem with the logic board.
I was wondering if anyone has any further ideas for me before I try swapping out the hard drive/infrared cable?
Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks.

I have pretty much the same problem, although I don't get the question mark, I get the gray screen with a symbol like a "no entry" sign. In other words, circle with a slash through it. Very odd. Never seen that before. I booted from two different external drives and the computer boots fine. The internal drive mounts on my desktop and is accessible, nothing is wrong. I cloned the internal drive to one of the external drives and booted from that fine as well.
The disk has been repaired via Drive Genius. I rebuilt the directory through Drive Genius and it seems to run just fine.
It seems it may be as simple as a bad or loose cable, but since the icon is something I'd never seen I wanted to see if anyone knows what that icon might mean. The only new thing I did last week was defrag the drive through Drive Genius.
Oh also, I replaced the battery last year from OWC. The glue holding the silver outer plate has come off so that battery, though working fine, is a bit of a pain. Since the battery is lose inside that casing, I was wondering if maybe there is a strain internally. I don't know the wiring that's near the battery connection.
Thanks for any help

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Message was edited by: a brody

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