Renaming USB Drive Labels in Linux There, you got all the inspirations from the web and

your friends and have now L inux proudly running on your system. (Linux is the kernel, ya ya I know you got it). Your friend approaches you to help him get rid of the virus in his USB driv e. And you are proud you are of help in terminating viruses with ease, thanks to Linux s security. And he asks you to do a favour. To rename the USB drive label t o his name, from the name disk . You try to rename it from the terminal, but it fails. (Yes, command mv doesn t wor k here.) You open /media, right click on the USB Drive folder and go to Properties. But y ou find no option there either to change the drive Label! (Am talking with respe ct to Ubuntu. It s great if other distros have it). Did your new Linux system fail you? In Windows, you can rename Labels of USB s jus t by visiting its Properties. Can t Linux do even this simple thing! Let me assure you that, you can, but in a slightly round about way. From Terminal You will be using the mlabel command. 1. First type the mount command to find out the device location of you pen drive . Find the line which goes like /dev/sdc1 on /media/disk . 2. This means the device sdc1 which is my pen drive is mounted on /media/disk. 3. Next unmount the device. sudo unmount /media/disk 4. Next use this command. sudo mlabel -i /dev/sdc1 ::<new_label> If you get a message like: Total number of sectors (7831520) not a multiple of sectors per track (63)! You can easily ignore the check by running this command: echo mtools_skip_check=1 >> ~/.mtoolsrc Try again and it should work. 5. The name of the USB should have changed. Unplug and Plug the pen drive back i n and it will be mounted with the new label name. The GUI way 1. For this you need the Gparted software. Install it if you don t have it already . 2. Open the software as a super user, and select the pen drive from GParted>Devi ces> 3. Unmount the device if it hasn t been, by right clicking on it. 4. After unmounting, right click on it and select Label and change it to whatever

you want it to be. And then Apply it, by clicking the Edit>Apply All Operations. 5. Your pendrives label should be changed now. Yes, it is a pretty around the way method. But unfortunately, nautilus doesn t cur rently support partition renaming. Hope it s there in Karmic Koala!