How can I rename an external HDD?

Asked Jan 17 '17 at 14:12

Active Jan 17 '17 at 14:47

Viewed 608 times

I have an external drive whose name used to be "2nd Brain". I lent it to a friend who renamed it but now I can't manage to rename it again. I followed the instructions from this answer, to use the disk utility to change the name, but as soon as I enter 2nd Brain it automatically becomes 2ND BRAIN.

I'm using Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. The filesystem format was FAT32, but now its listed as msdos. My friend must have changed that too. How do I change it back and how can I change the drive's name without having it capitalized?

edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:23

Community

asked Jan 17 '17 at 14:12

Tony Severino

What advice? What topic? You might want to take the [tour] or visit the [help] to familiarize yourself with how this site works. We're not a forum. If you are referring to another Q&A on this site, please [edit] your question and include a link to it. Also, [edit] your question and explain exactly what steps you took or what commands you ran. – terdon Jan 17 '17 at 14:19
Also please include what filesystem the drive is formatted as. – steeldriver Jan 17 '17 at 14:24
2

Possible duplicate of How to rename partitions? – John N Jan 17 '17 at 14:28
Yes, as I indicated above. But the answer given resulted in another issue. Hence my question. What are the other methods referred to in that answer? – Tony Severino Jan 17 '17 at 14:30
@terdon did I satisfy your requirements with my edits? – Tony Severino Jan 17 '17 at 14:43
Yes, thanks. That link was helpful. Note, however, that these aren't "my" requirements. I'm just trying to help you get an answer. – terdon Jan 17 '17 at 14:49
I suspect msdos is the partition table type, rather than the filesystem type. According to this [su] comment, the FAT32 standard supports lower case / mixed case although some Linux tools follow the Windows practice of not supporting it Setting a mixed-case volume label for a FAT32 drive on Windows - the comment suggests trying fatlabel from the dosfstools package. – steeldriver Jan 17 '17 at 14:52
@steeldriver dosfstools package? I'm not that knowledgeable with computers. Can you walk me through it? – Tony Severino Jan 17 '17 at 14:56
@TonySeverino - The generic usage is sudo fatlabel /dev/sdxN my_label , where "x" is the drive letter, "N" is the partition (most likely 1) and "my_label" is self-explanatory. – Jan 17 '17 at 15:05
Correction... It said: sudo: fatlabel: command not found – Tony Severino Jan 17 '17 at 15:10
Did you install the dosfstools package? – steeldriver Jan 17 '17 at 15:42
OK, I had my system checked out by a member of the public library IT staff. He said steeldriver was right, its because of a partition table. – Tony Severino Jan 19 '17 at 03:33
@steeldriver, I already have it. How do I run it? – Tony Severino Jan 19 '17 at 03:40

How can I rename an external HDD?

0 Answers0