Create lower case FAT volume names

May 07, '09 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: jagboy

Note: Please see comments for a safer method of doing this!

Have you ever been annoyed by those ugly capital letters in your USB drive's names? Well I was and here's how I fixed it:

  1. Locate your device: Open up Disk Utility and select the drive. Click on Info, and copy the device name, e.g.: disk2s1.
  2. Deactivate the disk (Do not Eject it).
  3. Open up a Terminal window, do a hexdump on the device name you just found, and grep for the current volume name:
    $ hexdump -C /dev/disk2s1 | grep "Pablo"
    00000040  80 00 29 08 ac 67 54 50  61 62 6c 6f 27 73 20 4b  |..).?gTPABLO'S K|
    010000e0  50 61 62 6c 6f 27 73 20  4b 65 79 08 00 00 18 bc  |PABLO'S KEY....?|
  4. Create a text file containing the new label: echo "Pablo's Key" > input
  5. Replace the old label with the new one using dd:
    $ dd if=input bs=1 count=11 seek=0x47 conv=notrunc of=/dev/disk2s1
    $ dd if=input bs=1 count=11 seek=0x10000e0 conv=notrunc of=/dev/disk2s1
    Note: Set the count value to the label's length. Remember that a FAT drive label cannot be longer than 11 characters.
  6. Run a new hexdump to verify:
    $ hexdump -C /dev/disk2s1 | grep "Pablo"
    00000040  80 00 29 08 ac 67 54 50  61 62 6c 6f 27 73 20 4b  |..).?gTPablo's K|
    010000e0  50 61 62 6c 6f 27 73 20  4b 65 79 08 00 00 18 bc  |Pablo's Key....?|
And as always, proceed at your own risk and back up any data on the drive before proceeding. You can find more detail on this, including some screenshots, in this MacRumors forum thread.

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