Rename ntfs formatted external drives

T

tridgley

New Member
Hi all, I have two external ntfs format usb drives permanently attached to my hdr. They were automatically assigned names when I plugged them in and I've tried to rename them before (using +opt and rename in both webif and on the remote) to no avail.

However I'm about to add a third drive and I would really like to name them all some more useful to me. They're currently named "USB-1" and "usb-drive1" when browsing on the humax, although they appear as "drive2" and "usb-drive1" respectively when browsing on my PC or tablet - as you can imagine when the third is there it could get confusing...

Is there any way to do this?

Also, as something of an aside: the smaller one, a 750gb drive, appears to work with the space used/available pie chart however the larger one, a 2tb drive, only works in the first few moments after the box boots up then it says information unavailable... I assumed this was something to do with the NTFS 3G package but I may be wrong. Is there anyway to get around this? Knowing what space is where when the third drive is attached (a 3tb drive so I assume it will have the same issue as the 2tb drive) would be really handy.

I did a search for this and found something relating to ext format drives but I didn't think the same applied to ntfs so I apologise if this has been asked and answered elsewhere already... many thanks in advance
 
I think what you need to do is plug them into a PC and rename the volumes using disk utilities.

Regarding the on-screen pie charts, these are generated by the standard Humax firmware which probably doesn't understand big drives.
 
Black Hole said:
I think what you need to do is plug them into a PC and rename the volumes using disk utilities.

Regarding the on-screen pie charts, these are generated by the standard Humax firmware which probably doesn't understand big drives.
Click to expand...


Thank you for your thoughts

They were named before they were plugged in and the humax ignored those names, is 'disk utilities' on Win7? If so is it different to right click and rename option for the drives in Windows explorer?

re. pie-charts - perhaps I wasn't clear, the pie chart works for the 2tb drive just after booting (first 30 odd seconds say) but then stops working which is what made me suspect a package loading somewhere?
 
Try it with a proper partition editor, eg the GParted Linux boot CD. I think Windows sets up aliases rather than actual labels, based on the drive ID (four bytes) stored in the MBR. You will at least be able to put a name to each partition, if not an overall disk label (I think it's limited to 11 characters).

Does the pie chart show valid info during the first 30 seconds?
 
I don't think it is possible to use the NTFS volume label with the current (old) kernel and ntfs-3g. The Humax app. doesn't recognise the drive as being ntfs (if it did, it would treat it as read only).

It might be possible to modify the script to read the volume label and remount using that as a mount point but that may require another version of CF.
 
Ok thank you, that makes sense and would also perhaps explain why the pie chart doesn't work for the larger drive once ntfs 3g has loaded?

If the functionality isn't there it I'm not fussed, l just wanted to make sure I wasn't being silly and missing some obvious option.
 
Does that mean your 750GB drive is FAT? I wouldn't have thought it took 30 secs for ntfs-3g to start up.
 
Possibly.. :confused: I thought both were ntfs, but really thinking about it I may have started using the 750gb drive with the humax before the ntfs 3g package came about so was maybe I was forced to FAT it up ;) I'll check sometime soon.

30 seconds was an arbitrary number, I know that if I'm quick and go to usb as soon as humax starts up I can get to a point where pie chart works before it stops working
 
tridgley said:
30 seconds was an arbitrary number, I know that if I'm quick and go to usb as soon as humax starts up I can get to a point where pie chart works before it stops working
Click to expand...
It is probably around 1 or 2 seconds. The Humax app. initially mounts the drive using the standard read only ntfs driver. The ntfs-3g package then takes over and unmounts the drive before remounting it with the ntfs-3g driver.
 
Ah! As soon as I plugged it into my computer and Windows didn't automatically recognise it I remembered, the 750gb drive is EXT formatted by the Humax because as I said above I started using it with the humax before the ntfs 3g package came about.

So why can't I rename that? Or is that something the Humax doesn't give you the option for when formatting an external drive itself?

Thank you xyz321, that explains why on occasion I see it work briefly initially.
 
ah yes, this is the thread I found when searching initially (and under the impression both drives were ntfs) thanks for your help everyone.
 
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