What's the easiest way to rename (change the volume label of) a fat16 volume (e.g. on a USB drive) from linux? It seems like mlabel
from the mtools
package is meant to do this, but the documentation is not geared to rapid assimilation.
Linux – Renaming a FAT16 Volume
fat16linuxlogical-drivepartitioning
Best Answer
Found this guide to using mtools, which explains the following:
Check the current label
ex:
Note that we're using the special "::" drive which allows us to specify the device descriptor on the command line; otherwise we'd have to edit ~/.mtoolsrc to assign a drive letter (see Option 2 under "Change the label").
Change the label
After unmounting and checking the current label (above), use
ex:
Ignore the "Volume label is XYZ" output as this is the old label. Jump to the Verify the Change section below.
My initial confusion stemmed from the fact that the
-i
option is not documented in themlabel
manpage. The full version of the manual doesn't mention this option specifically formlabel
; I'm guessing it's a general option that applies to all of themtools
utils, but haven't dug around in the manual to check for the existence of documentation to that effect.However, I'm finding that setting a 10-character volume label ("KATAROWSKI") doesn't work: there is some extra stuff appended to the end of the label that translates, under linux to the
à
character, and under Windows showed up as a?
.