Renaming flash drive

Do you belong to the Administrator Group ?

(Disk Management is in the right-click of the Start Menu, for examining your overall storage situation, drive letters, device rows and so on.)

In Administrator terminal session:

label E: SANDISK1 # Where E: happens to be the letter of the USB drive partition

label E: SANDISK01 # Spaces in a label, would not be convenient later (cross-platform) # It says below that 32 characters is the max. Nine characters should be OK.

label E: SANDSK01 # A traditionalist uses eight characters (as if this was DOS).

This is an example of me, playing with the C: drive

PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> label.exe -? <=== Intended to print the help Access Denied as you do not have sufficient privileges or <=== It's really quite snotty :-) the disk may be locked by another process. You have to invoke this utility running in elevated mode and make sure the disk is unlocked.

PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> label c: <=== Incomplete command, it will prompt for the details Volume in drive C: is W11HOME Volume Serial Number is FA6E-E6DA Volume label (32 characters, ENTER for none)? <==== You would enter the new label here

Delete current volume label (Y/N)? N <==== An extra step necessary, to achieve a blank label (if desired) PS C:\WINDOWS\system32>

Various graphical ways could work, but then they would have a problem achieving unambiguous elevation. This is a problem for limited-user accounts (work laptop).

We use a Terminal session from Right-click Start, so we can review how the interactive session went for the label. We can see what it did.

And to be shed of the label command and its quirks, we can do

PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> fsutil volume querylabel C: Volume Label for "C:" is "W11HOME" PS C:\WINDOWS\system32>

and that allows checking how it went. Disk Management will also show the change we have achieved from the elevated Terminal session.

A few Windows situations, will prompt for a password and elevate right in front of you, as a means of correcting the situation. But more often, it is up to the user to elevate or use a sequence where elevation is explicit.

A stick can be write-protected. That's an additional curse, over and beyond needing to be elevated.

"... attributes disk set readonly"

And it is not always obvious, how to fix this either.

The "diskpart.exe" utility gives such access (elevated). You can set attributes there.

Paul

If you run Linux Mint live on a USB drive, you can use the "Disks" utility to rename your flash drive.