Overriding sector size on disks?

[Warren Block]

On Fri, 1 Nov 2013, Adrian Chadd 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.

ISTR some Hitachi external USB disk enclosures do that.  Since they are 
not a general-purpose enclosure but came wrapped around specific Hitachi 
disks, it's not really their fault.

> 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.

Is it out of the question to discard the enclosure as too bugged to use?

Otherwise, there is a small chance that the vendor has a firmware update 
that isn't stupid.  Or maybe even a jumper in the enclosure.

Reference:

http://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?t=21099&start= has some 
information which might help.