BIOS – How the Name of a Bootable Hard Drive is Created and Changed

biosboothard drivelinuxUbuntu

I have an external hard drive with three partitions: an EFI partition, and two Linux install partitions.

When I plug the hard drive into my computer and enter the boot menu to boot into my portable installs, the hard drive shows up in the list as expected, but its name is not what I anticipated (see picture).

 USB1 - Ubuntu(ST1000LX015-107172 0)

Does anyone know what actually named the drive like this (I know it's the name of the first OS I installed, Ubuntu, with the firmware name of the hard drive in parentheses).

Secondly, is there a way to change this name?

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Best Answer

“…with the firmware name of the hard drive in parentheses…”

Nope. That is not firmware name. That is the drive model number.

That name can be distilled to simply ST1000LX015 which basically means your system sees USB1 as having an Ubuntu install available on a drive with the model number ST1000LX015 which is a Seagate ST1000LX015 FireCuda.

The 1U7172 appended to it is just the revision number for the drive itself. Meaning the drive model number is ST1000LX015 with a revision number of 1U7172.

As to how that can be changed? It all depends on the USB-to-SATA bridge board in the USB enclosure and I honestly don’t think what you want to do can be done.

Some external USB enclosures have USB-to-SATA bridge boards that simply send their own generic device names for any drive they are hooked up to. In this case it seems the USB-to-SATA bridge board is just passing through the drive model name.

So I don’t know if it is possible to change that “name” to anything else nor am I familiar with an USB-to-SATA bridge boards that allow for custom naming.

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