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

William H. Magill magill at mcgillsociety.org
Wed Jan 5 20:57:44 PST 2005


On 05 Jan, 2005, at 23:10, Jerry Krinock wrote:
> 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?

It's stored in the disk label.

What you are seeing is actually the partition name, not the disk name.

For example, this is the first internal drive on my system, which has 
two partitions:
BenNevis and Loch.

dun> diskutil list disk0
/dev/disk0
    #:                   type name               size      identifier
    0: Apple_partition_scheme                    *55.9 GB  disk0
    1:    Apple_partition_map                    31.5 KB   disk0s1
    2:         Apple_Driver43                    28.0 KB   disk0s2
    3:         Apple_Driver43                    28.0 KB   disk0s3
    4:       Apple_Driver_ATA                    28.0 KB   disk0s4
    5:       Apple_Driver_ATA                    28.0 KB   disk0s5
    6:         Apple_FWDriver                    256.0 KB  disk0s6
    7:     Apple_Driver_IOKit                    256.0 KB  disk0s7
    8:          Apple_Patches                    256.0 KB  disk0s8
    9:              Apple_HFS BenNevis           27.9 GB   disk0s9
   10:              Apple_HFS Loch               27.9 GB   disk0s10

As I recall, you can't change the name without re-partitioning under OS 
X.

T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill
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