Mostly a post for my future refererence, as it took some Googling to find this, but it might be useful to others.
I wanted to view/change the “drive label” for a FAT partition. This is done with the mlabel tool from the mtools package, but it has a strange insistence on setting up “drive letter” mappings, in /etc/mtools.conf or ~/.mtoolsrc, so that you can use it as, for example:
mlabel e:
Um, no thanks. I don’t want to map a Windows-like notion of drive letters to a partition which may appear at a different device each time (it’s a USB device; the point of having the label is to not have to know or care what device node it’s been assigned this time – if USB devices are connected in a different order, it might not be /dev/sdf next time).
The option needed is -i which doesn’t appear to be documented in the mlabel manpage, used along with the fake drive letter ::, for example:
# setting:
[dave@ruthenium ~]$ sudo mlabel -i /dev/sdf1 ::DAVEBLACKBERRY
# viewing:
[dave@ruthenium ~]$ sudo mlabel -s -i /dev/sdf1 ::
Volume label is DAVEBLACKBERRY
With that done, I can then add an entry to /etc/fstab which identifies the device by its label:
[dave@ruthenium ~]$ grep BLACKBERRY /etc/fstab
/dev/disk/by-label/DAVEBLACKBERRY /mnt/blackberry vfat defaults,uid=dave,gid=users 0 0
I should have been able to use LABEL=DAVEBLACKBERRY rather than the long /dev/disk/by-label/... notation, but LABEL= didn’t work, and I didn’t have tiem to figure out why :)
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Thanks for the ‘post’ Labelling FAT/FAT32 partitions in Linux.
I used it to identify an External fat32 465Gb Drive.
The Label worked fine, but as I’m new to Linux & NOT computer lit.,[I am using ubuntu 8.04.], I do not understand “add an entry to /etc/fstab which identifies the device by its label”.
I tried……
jack@jack-desktop:~$ grep External_HD /etc/fstab
jack@jack-desktop:~$ /dev/sdb1/465Gb_HD/External_HD /mnt/External_HD
bash: /dev/sdb1/465Gb_HD/External_HD: Not a directory
donal@donal-desktop:~$
@Jack:
By “add an entry to /etc/fstab” I mean that you should edit the file, and add a line similar to:
(Basically, copy the format of the lines already in there, but specify the device as LABEL=labelname rather than /dev/sdb1 for instance.)
(Also, in the past I seem to recall having problems using LABEL=labelname and had to use /dev/disks/by-label/labelname instead, for some reason.)
Hope this is useful.
Hey thanks for this info.
I do data recovery using linux. I often attach a group of raid drives for recovery and figure out the arrangements and then when I reboot linux puts them in a different order…. Grrrr…
This will help.
If you need a recovery you can find me at alandatarecovery.com
Take Care