I'm Hiding 🇦🇺

I jumped off Reddit’s cliff and landed here just like many other Lemmings.

  • 2 Posts
  • 41 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I’m not using Windows. I run Debian on this server.

    The bulk of external enclosures that money can buy tell the computer they’re plugged into that the disks have logical sector sizes of 4096 bytes, apparently for compatibility with >2TB drives on Windows XP.

    I do not need compatibility with Windows XP as the current year is 2024. My disk has logical sectors 512 bytes in size, but the external enclosures don’t report that. I want to know how I can mount the disk anyway, despite the enclosure’s attempts to thwart me. I know the disk is fine, as it is detected with 512 byte sectors and mounts happily via SATA.



  • The only enclosure I have that works out of the box is one of those “SATA to USB adaptors” rather than a bona fide “3.5 inch drive enclosure”. It’s not ideal for long-term use.

    I wonder if there’s a place to find out if any given make/model of enclosure will report the sector size as 512 bytes. Then, presumably, one could purchase an enclosure off that list and be confident the disk will be readable.



  • No - I’ve been working on a headless server, and ideally I need this thing to be written into /etc/fstab and work reliably from the command line. I could plug the drive into my laptop to have a look in some GUI tools if you think there’s one around that can circumvent the sector size mismatch, but in the end I’ll need a CLI method.