Bad disk controller bad or Hard Drive Cable?

2 Different hard drives refuse to partition with disk utility while being connected internally to this mac book pro. The drives work fine in other machines. I pulled the original drive verified it with disk utility, copied the data off and ran the extended manufactures test tools on in which said it was ok.

So I figure either the hard drive cable or the disk controller on the motherboard is bad. Is there a way to tell with out buying another cable?

In other cases I read about where the cable was bad the disks were not showing up at all. In this laptop they show up in disk utility but writing (including partitioning) doesn't seem to work. The laptop boots fine off things connected to usb.