Can you rename the internal hard drive? If so, how?

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Level 1

17 points

Can you rename the internal hard drive? If so, how?

My daughter had a hard drive failure. She was able to restore her Time Machine backups to a new hard drive on her MacBook white. Unfortunately she did not put a name on the hard drive, so it shows up as "untitled". I would like to rename it to something such as OSX. Is this possible? Would it affect anything. I believe this is just a label, but the only way I have seen to do this is Disk Utility when reformatting the hard drive which I do not want to do. Is possible to rename the internal hard drive on a MacBook and if so how? I would like to straighten this out before upgrading to Snow Leopard.

Macbook White, Mac OS X (10.5.8)

Posted on Dec 22, 2009 11:39 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Niel

Level 10

727,163 points

Dec 22, 2009 11:41 AM in response to motero

Select it on the desktop and push Enter.

(49382)

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Answer 2

Pondini

Level 8

38,863 points

Dec 22, 2009 3:13 PM in response to motero

One caution: when it's renamed, Time Machine will treat it as a whole new disk, so will do a full backup of it.

Backups of the "Untitled" drive may not be easily visible in the "Star Wars" display; see #E3 in the Time Machine - Troubleshooting *User Tip,* also at the top of this forum.

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Answer 3

V.K.

Level 9

56,174 points

Dec 22, 2009 3:45 PM in response to Pondini

Pondini wrote:
One caution: when it's renamed, Time Machine will treat it as a whole new disk, so will do a full backup of it.

no, it won't. not if everything is working correctly. haven't we discussed this before? TM identifies the disks it's backing up by their UUIDs not names. renaming a disk will not (or at least it should not) force a full backup. I've done it plenty of times.

Backups of the "Untitled" drive may not be easily visible in the "Star Wars" display; see #E3 in the Time Machine - Troubleshooting *User Tip,* also at the top of this forum.

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Answer 4

Pondini

Level 8

38,863 points

Dec 22, 2009 4:25 PM in response to V.K.

V.K. wrote:

Pondini wrote:
One caution: when it's renamed, Time Machine will treat it as a whole new disk, so will do a full backup of it.

no, it won't. not if everything is working correctly. haven't we discussed this before? TM identifies the disks it's backing up by their UUIDs not names. renaming a disk will not (or at least it should not) force a full backup. I've done it plenty of times.

Yes, we did discuss it, and came to the conclusion that it's another of those things that works differently for you and me.

TM did it for me on Leopard on my old G5 iMac, and on my Intel iMac on SL, and for others, too. There have been several threads with extra large backups, and/or where folks couldn't see the prior backups because they'd renamed the drive. In one case I recall, they'd just changed the case: +Macintosh HD+ to +MACINTOSH HD.+

I just tried it again: renamed a partition on an external HD, with a few files on it. TM did another full backup of it. (I haven't tried it with my boot drive.)

Beats me! 🙂

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