HDD Not Detected In Disk Utility With Current RAM
Earlier this week during use applications became locking up and slowly started force closing. Once things had completely locked up I held the power down and restarted the laptop. Startup only booted to the blinking question mark so I connected my external boot of 10.8 and looked at disk utilities and the HDD was no longer listed. After trying a drive I knew worked (which also wouldn't boot or display in disk utilities) I removed and replaced both DIMMS of RAM. This allowed me to boot. I ran memtest on the previous RAM several times now and it does not come up with any problems and when I boot into the external 10.8 image it sees the RAM perfectly but not the HDD. Any ideas what might be the case it would see the original RAM but not the HDD and in the second case see the HDD and the lower capacity RAM?
Specs:
Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro8,1
Processor Name: Intel Core i5
Processor Speed: 2.3 GHz
Memory: 16 GB
Boot ROM Version: MBP81.0047.B27
SMC Version (system): 1.68f99
Memory Slots:
ECC: Disabled
BANK 0/DIMM0:
Size: 8 GB
Type: DDR3
Speed: 1333 MHz
Status: OK
Manufacturer: 0x8502
Part Number: 0x505341333847313333333253000000000000
Serial Number: 0x00000000
BANK 1/DIMM0:
Size: 8 GB
Type: DDR3
Speed: 1333 MHz
Status: OK
Manufacturer: 0x8502
Part Number: 0x505341333847313333333253000000000000
Serial Number: 0x00000000
Is this a good question?