Overriding sector size on disks?

[Mark Felder]

On Nov 1, 2013, at 9:45 PM, Adrian Chadd <adrian at freebsd.org> wrote:

> Hi!
> 
> I have an odd problem. That, honestly, can't be that odd.
> 
> I have a bunch of SATA disks that when plugged into the laptop
> directly, show up as 512 byte sectors. But if I plug it in via this
> iomega USB caddy, they show up as 4k sector devices.
> 
> Because of this, partitions just plainly don't work.
> 
> Has anyone faced this? Is there some trick to do to get these things
> to go back to being 512 byte sector devices so one can use them?
> 
> Similarly, because they show up as 512 byte sector devices on
> macosx/linux, they can read/write NTFS/MSDOS partitions on the thing.
> But if I plug it into freebsd, it shows up as a 4k sector device and
> things plainly don't work.
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> 

My coworker ran into this once. We couldn’t find a workaround. We just noted that we either had to use the disk with the adapter or without — you cannot swap between and expect to read your data.