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Safe way to change the name of your "Macintosh HD"

H

Halcyon

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Searched the forum, found nothing...even though I remember reading about it in here.

Can you just highlight the Macintosh HD and change the name without screwing other things?

All my Mac's are in a LAN and the HD on all of them have the same name, some users get confuse at times so I want to make it distinctively clear which HD is which.

TIA
 
You can do it with no problem. As far as the computer is concerned, it is always "/". In OS8 and OS9, the Drive Name was actually a required part of the path, so changing the name would often corrupt the entire systems. Today since OS X is UNIX, the name of the boot drive is just a label.

TEG
 
TEG said:
n OS8 and OS9, the Drive Name was actually a required part of the path, so changing the name would often corrupt the entire systems.
Click to expand...

No it wouldn't.
Your home folder is the folder you DO NOT want to change. The HDD is no biggy.
 
killmoms said:
Yes, you can just change it with no ill effects.
Click to expand...
One caveat ... (because I did this recently)

I have two HD's and one Time machine drive (external) and it bugged me one day that when you are looking at them in the finder, they only sort alphabetically and I didn't like the order.

To make a long story shorter, I spent about a half hour naming and renaming the three drives back and forth between about four or five names seeing how I liked each.

The computer got *very* confused as to which one was the Time Machine drive (several times), because I was calling it the same name as the main drive or swapping the name back and forth etc. I ended up having to disconnect the Time Machine drive and reboot a few times so that the system could re-scan the bus and figure out which drive was which again.

So yes, you *can* confuse the computer if you screw around enough with the drive names. I suggest doing it on paper first and then changing them just once.
 
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