External Hard Drive 'All Caps' Problem

[joelandsonja]

I realize this may sound strange to some of you, but I am trying to figure out how to rename my External Harddrive so that the title will show without using 'All Caps'. At the moment my harddrive displays as 'LOCAL DISK' while all of my other external harddrives display 'Local Disk'. I tried using GParted to fix the problem, but when I type in 'Local Disk' it simply reverts back to 'LOCAL DISK' when I try to save it.

Any thoughts?

[joelandsonja]

I was told in another forum that it could be the fact that the drive is a FAT drive, but I am not sure if I am able to change the drive to something else without erasing the information. At any rate I wouldn't know what 'Flag' to change it to.

Any Suggestions?

[highfructose327]

I think they may be correct about the naming in all caps with FAT32. If you are going to use this hard drive between a linux and windows or even apple. Stay with FAT32, it is a safe bet. Now if you are only using it with linux you could use ext3, ext4. If you have data on the drive you will need to back up the data before formatting it, or you will loose it.

[devils casper]

NTFS read/write is well supported by all major OSes and ntfs-3g package made it possible. There is no need to stick with FAT32 these days.

Regarding Labels, did you try to change Label of External disk's partitions in Windows OS machine? It will show same Labels ( in correct case ) in Linux distro too.

[nmset]

You may change the label of a vfat (perhaps ntfs also) partition from linux too. You will need the mtools package.

Machine Cycle: Format and Label a FAT32 External Disk

[joelandsonja]

I haven't tried to change the labels in windows, because I don't want to install it on my system, but I might have to do that to get this done.

[highfructose327]

joelandsonja,
after devil's casper said that he thought the case might stay as you input in windows, I was curious, so I gave it a try on a thumb drive that is formatted fat32. To see if it would stay lower case so I relabeled it one time as "Test" and then as "test" in Windows 7. Both times when the drive was re-mounted in Windows and Linux it showed up all caps as "TEST". I can not speak to NTFS disk labels, whether or not they will keep a label case sensitive as you input it.