Lenovo HDD in USB external problem

[exlhpstudent]

I got a 80GB 2.5" SATA HDD from my lenovo x61 tablet. I bought a larger drive to use it in the tablet and now I want to put the old drive to USB casing to use as external HDD.

However, when I plug the old drive in USB port, the computer does not recognize it. I went to drive management and found that the drive was not initialized. Since there is not thing important in the drive, I went ahead and initialize it. It failed to initialize, the error message I got is the computer unable to find the right sector.

I put the drive back into the laptop, and recover the OS using Lenovo recovery disks. Now the drive works fine. However, when I plug in the USB, the same thing happen again.

I ruled out the problem with the external case, because I tested it with another drive, both 2.5 and 3.5, and the computer was able to recognize both.

My question is, whether Lenovo has a proprietary feature that makes the drive not readable via USB or another computer. I don't have another SATA laptop to test the later, but my hunch told me that it is possible that Lenovo put that feature on.

Can anyone confirm this or help me resolve this problem?