Change Hard Disk Partition or Volume Label Name in DOS Command Prompt

In modern advanced Windows operating system, renaming the name or label of the hard disk drive, partition or volume is an easy task, just like how user renames a file or folder. Normally when formatting a hard disk drive or partition volume, user can enter a label for the volume. And, for user who need to perform the renaming in command prompt DOS environment, the old good “label” utility comes to help.

Label, label.exe is a command-line utility to view or change the label or name of the computer disk drives that is available in most Microsoft MS-DOS and Windows operating system including Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2000, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista, Windows 7, and likely all future versions of Windows OSes.

To use label.exe to create, change, or delete the volume label of a disk, use the following syntax:

LABEL [drive:][label]

For example,

label c: myvolume

Above command will label the C: drive to “myvolume”. Note that the label command only work if the disk is not write protected.

User can also simply enter “label” command to view current label on the working drive, and when doing so, automatically get a prompt to enter new label if wanted to change the name of the partition.

Be careful when label a volume with ASCII or other extended characters, as ScanDisk in MS-DOS 6.0 or lower cannot recognize the characters, hence assume the label is corrupt or incorrent data, and will attempt to fix the label. If scandisk attempts to fix the harddisk’s label, it may remove all information and place it into a CHK file.

Besides, fdisk utility also cannot delete the partition with unrecognizable characters. However, user can always use label utility to rename and change the name of volume for deletion in fdisk to work.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 24th, 2008 at 2:48 am and is filed under Operating Systems. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.