Ok guys and girls.. I've put a few days of work into this problem and have finally come to my whits end.
I have a 500 GB hard drive (Toshiba MQ01ABD050) that is giving me quite a hard time. This is a brand new drive and I have already run a long SMART test on it. Anyway.. I am able to insert this drive into a laptop (Dell XPS M1330) and initialize it as MBR and create a new NTFS partition. All of this works well.
The problem is that when I remove it from the laptop and try to access the drive from any other computers (2 in total) via a SATA to USB converter, the drive is displayed as RAW. Chkdisk says that it can not run on the disk because it is not NTFS. ntfsfix on Linux also gives a similar error.
It gets weirder though.. If I format the drive on my desktop computer and make a new partition, It will now display on the laptop as RAW!
I have done a ton of research and have found someone with a similar sounding problem (Here's the thread: http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Options-Accessories/IBM-Hard-Drive-Only-Runs-In-One-Computer/td-p/130014). I believe there may be some sort of feature (bug) in the HDD firmware that locks its partitions to the computer that they were created on.
I was hoping one of you guys could clear up this confusion! Thank you in advance for your expertise.