Samuria said:
If the bios cant see it its toast unless it the connection
It definitely is not a connection issue. I had an old laptop drive that I installed in this laptop and the BIOS saw it immediately and booted it right up. I just ordered a new Samsung 870 EVO 2TB Internal SSD SATA drive to replace the old "sea snake" drive and found a local repair shop that can retrieve the data and install it on the new drive at a very reasonable price.

I thank everyone for their input and suggestions.