Drive name cannot be changed

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Level 1

9 points

Drive name cannot be changed

I have a MacBook Air, 11", 4GB ram, 250 GB SSD running Yosemite. I'm trying to upgrade to El Capitan and I 'think' my difficulties are resulting from my drive being somehow renamed from 'et' to what appears to be a very long string of spaces that also caused Time Machine to stop functioning some time back. When I try to rename the drive I get one of two messages; 1. The name can't be used. "Try using a name with fewer characters, or with no punctuation marks." or 2. "The Operation can't be completed. An unexpected error occurred (error code -8076)." All other normal name change techniques have also failed, meaning getting info, unlocking, clicking the drive name and making the change. And that also includes using Apple's disk utility to try and change the name, or repair the drive. (Drive repairs, no trouble found.) And it also includes using terminal. My unix is a bit rusty, I've only tried the mv and diskutil rename command both with the drive name approximated " " and using the drive ID's 'disk0', and 'disk0s2'. I think the drive name must have been somehow replaced with some weird ascii characters that are either escaped or contain something that cannot be copied or pasted in the standard entry. If it helps, the actual commands I have tried using diskutil are;

$ diskutil rename " " "et"

$ diskutil rename disk0s2 et

As I said, my unix is rusty, if you see an error in my entries, please feel free to correct me. It tells me that the Volume must be mounted. So I used the 'diskutil mount' command which fails (partitioned), and the 'diskutil mountDisk' command which shows success however reissuing the 'diskutil rename x y' command again returns the same message "Volume must be mounted". So I assume that the two commands must be combined on the same line however there are no examples given and I don't know how (help!).

I've been able to do a simple drag & drop backup (copy) of most of the files to a 3 TB usb drive. Whatever constructive criticism, suggestions, or ideas that you may have would be greatly appreciated. I fear that my only solution might be to reformat my SSD drive, which as am unsure how to recover from. So I would like to avoid this option if possible.

MacBook Air, OS X Yosemite (10.10.5), it's old

Posted on Aug 30, 2016 7:58 AM

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Answer 1

keg55

Level 6

11,743 points

Aug 30, 2016 8:40 AM in response to Erin.Thor

I would reformat the drive naming it Macintosh HD for now and reinstall OS X. You can rename it later once inside OS X using Finder instead of Terminal commands.

You can back up your 250GB SSD by restarting into Recovery Mode (Command+R). I'm assuming your current OS Is Yosemite. From the OS X Utilities Menu, select Disk Utility. Select the drive name not the partition underneath and click the Restore tab. Set the Source as the partition you have OS X and your data on and set the Destination to an external drive. The external needs to be of equal or greater size as your internal SSD (250GB). Click Apply or Restore and this will block-copy (clone) your internal drive (including its Recovery HD) onto the external that you can boot from. Once the Restore completes you can stay in Recovery Mode and erase/reformat your OS partition and name it Macintosh HD (for now). Then Reinstall OS X from the OS X Utilities menu which will reinstall OS X Yosemite 10.10.5. During Setup after the install, you can use Setup Migration and the external drive you created previously to restore your user accounts, data and settings.

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