Looking at the cause of damaged hard drive cable issue which can potentially affect ALL pre-Retina unibody MacBook Pro 13" designs and some 15" models.
This issue was discovered whilst working on a customers Mid-2012 MacBook Pro 13" (Model A1278) and a possible fix and preventative measure was created by using insulation tape on the cable and inside of the chassis to prevent the cable from wearing against the machined aluminium unibody of the laptop.
This resolved the issue on a customer system which had already had a replacement HDD cable in the past and had began to exhibit the same symptoms again and was failing to boot in to OS X.
This style of cable run and hard drive location is found on the following MacBook Pros, which may all suffer from this issue.
MacBook Pro 13:
Unibody Mid 2009
Unibody Mid 2010
Unibody Early 2011
Unibody Late 2011
Unibody Mid 2012
MacBook Pro 15:
Unibody Mid 2009
Unibody Mid 2010
Unibody Early 2011
Unibody Late 2011
Unibody Mid 2012
MacBook Pro 17:
Unibody