January 28, 2009

The Volume Label

Filed under: Main — Tags: , — admin @ 12:01 am

Most people would think that a volume label would be found by a knob and it would have tick marks going from 0 up to 10 (or maybe even 11). In the realm of computers, however, a volume label is something completely different.

The simple short answer is that the volume label is the name you give to a storage device.

In Windows the volume label has no significance as far as file storage is concerned. The storage device is referred to primarily by its drive letter, C: or D: or whatever. The volume label is just the name that appears under the drive’s icon in the Computer window, such as Local Drive or OS or Milton.

You can change the volume label at any time: Simply click the drive icon and press the F2 key, the Rename command. Type in a new name. That’s it. The name is used when referring to the drive, but it’s not crucial for locating files or programs. So changing the volume label in Windows does not confuse anything.

On the Mac, however, changing a volume label might cause files to be lost. One of my cats stepped on the Mac’s keyboard one night and renamed the hard drive volume label. Some programs had trouble locating files because of that (and it took me the longest time to figure out). Because of that problem, I don’t recommend changing a volume label on a Mac unless you do it right when you first use or install the drive.

The only time the volume label comes into play in Windows is when formatting the storage device. Some utilities, such as the command line convert program, require that you type the volume label in as a confirmation that you’re working with the proper drive. Other than that, the volume label is merely trivia you can use to amuse your friends or win the final round of “I’m Geekier Than You” at your next computer party.

2 Comments

  1. In the early 1990s I helped to maintain several computers running MS-DOS version 6. When the DOS SHELL interface was run in graphics mode, there was a row of icons for each drive. The way DOS SHELL distinguished between hard drives and RAM drives was solely by examining the volume label. If the name of the RAM drive was changed from its default, DOS SHELL would assign it a hard drive icon.

    Comment by sean bernard — January 29, 2009 @ 3:05 pm

  2. Good example. DOS SHELL (or “DOS Hell” as I nicknamed it) was a truly exceptional shell program. It offered better multitasking just as Windows was making its debut. DOS SHELL had better multitasking, in fact, which is why it was killed.

    Comment by admin — January 30, 2009 @ 6:53 am

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.


Powered by WordPress