I know a Mac volume can be renamed… obviously.
But if you look at the output of diskutil
you will see that a volume also has a "device name" that corresponds to the name it was given when it was formatted:
diskutil info /dev/disk0s1 | grep 'Media Name'
Running it on your root volume you will probably get "Macintosh HD" (or else something like "Untitled 1" if that's how you left it when formatting in Disk Utility). It seems this doesn't change when you rename the volume after the fact.
Why do these different names for the same volume exist?
Does anything even refer to this hidden name?
Can it be changed?
Best Answer
The Device / Media Name is set when a partition is created on a disk. The only way you could rename the "startup partition" would be to startup from another drive. The initial name is set by Apple code by the way.
On Lion you will most likely find the following device names:
disk0: The make and model of your drive
disk0s1: "EFI system partition"
disk0s2: "Customer"
disk0s3: "Recovery HD"
If you add your own custom partition to the mix you will find that Apple's tools (i.e. Disk Utility) will match the visible name and the device name.
All of that said there's no reason you should worry about changing this name. Nothing will reference it at the CLI or GUI level.