Mid 2009 MacBook won't recognize [any] hard drive My MacBook had been acting fine. I applied the latest update to Mountain Lion and closed the lid. When I opened the lid, it wouldn't wake from sleep (dark screen with whirring fan for ~5mins). I held the power button and it rebooted to a dark grey screen. I reset the pram using Cmd+Option+P and it booted to the grey screen with flashing question mark. So I rebooted with the install disk for lion (I didn't make one for 10.8). Disk Utility doesn't see my root partition, it does however see the Mac OSX Base System 1.4 GB partition (I'm not sure if this is actually on my HDD or if it is a virtual file system created by the install disk). In any case, I swapped out to my OEM hard disk and rebooted. Disk utility still only sees the Mac OSX Base System. diskutil list reports the same. I can't reboot to recovery via Cmd+R or via holding the Option key. I also don't hear the hard drive spin up. At this point I'm thinking that I have a bad motherboard. 

Is there any way to confirm that the motherboard is indeed bad?
It was the logic board. I'm using the hard drive now as an external drive with out problem.