[X-Unix] Renaming "NO NAME" Flash Disks

Alexandre Gauthier supernaut at underwares.org
Wed Jan 5 20:21:50 PST 2005


Jerry Krinock wrote:

>Thank you all for sharing your knowledge on "Macintosh compatibility" of
>flash disks.  It has been very useful.
>
>I have one more question.  How can I rename one of these foreign flash disks
>in OS X?
>
>In OS X, it shows up in the Finder as "NO NAME".  The name is not enabled
>for editing.  
>
I was able to rename my USB watch flash drive to "Watch" in OS X 10.3

>I cannot do it in Terminal either.  Here's what happens:
>
>ENG1-0020:/Volumes jk$ mv "NO NAME" MyDisk
>mv: rename NO NAME to MyDisk: Operation not permitted
>  
>
Oooh, that is wrong. You are not changing the volume label but rather 
moving/renaming the *mount point*. Which is bad.
And in any case you can't do it while it is mounted.

>However, if I plug it into an old Mac booted into OS9, the name is enabled
>for editing!!  When I change "NO NAME" to "MyDisk", and look in the file
>browser on the MP3 player, I see it has created a file at the root level
>named MyDisk.  The amazing thing is that this file is not visible in the
>Finder, and also does not show in Terminal when I type "ls -al".  I wonder
>what kind of magic file is this?  How does a disk know it's own name?
>  
>
Well, it depends of the filesystem, really. If it is Fat/Fat32, you 
would see the resource fork files, which is perfectly normal.
A drive knows its name by the filesystem label. How is your drive formatted?

--
Alexandre Gauthier
supernaut at underwares.org

Underwares.org
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