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Changing name of partition?

mklos

mklos

macrumors 68000
Original poster
On my FP iMac I have my hard drive partitioned. The first partition is named swap, which is where I've moved my swap file to after intalling Panther. I want to rename this partition to .swap so its not shown on the desktop, but when I do that it tells me that you cannot use a file name with a dot in front because theya rereserved for system use only. Does anyone know if there is a way to do this anyway. I've done it before when I partitioned my drive, but it wouldn't let me in the Panther version of Drive Utility.

I've even tried loggin in as "root" and it still would allow me to put a dot in front of the file name. Is there something I can do in the Terminal that will allow me to change the swap partition to .swap, or is there another way to make it so that the swap partition doesn't show on my desktop?

Thanks!
 
i do not believe you can make a volume invisible in such a way. files and directories, but not volumes. you may be stuck with it on your desktop... i just ignore my swap partition.

pnw
 
In Finder preferences you can tell it to stop displaying all hard drives on the desktop. This might not be what you had in mind though. I have my hard drive in the dock now and with 1 click I have access to everything. To me it's more convenient than having drives on the desktop.
 
I could do this in Jaguar. Before when I intstalled Jaguar I would go to Disk Utility and partition my drives. There it would let me name my swap partition .swap, but now in Panther when I go to Disk Utility and try to name my swap partition .swap it won't let me put a dot in front of the swap so I left it and figured that I could maybe change it after OS X.3 installed, but apparently not. Maybe I'll boot from my Jaguar CD and use that Disk Utility and then reboot with the Panther CD and then install Panther. But then I can't use the Journaling file system. Poop! Anyone else got any suggestions?
 
This is just a guess, I have no responsibility if it stops your system from booting, etc etc...

Open up a terminal and type

cd /Volumes
sudo mv swap .swap

See whether that works.
 
Nermal, i'm just curious what that command would do?

isn't there a 'rename' command that could do it?

isn't 'mv' the move command? or am i a bit messed up?? 😛
 
Originally posted by cb911
Nermal, i'm just curious what that command would do?

isn't there a 'rename' command that could do it?

isn't 'mv' the move command? or am i a bit messed up?? 😛
Click to expand...

mv is rename and move. why have both commands if you only need one?

A question though: how do you set which partition is the swap partition?
 
I can use a program called SwapCop to change where the swap file goes. FYI...thats on VersionTracker and works with Mac OS 10.0-10.3
 
if you change the name of the partition, you will have to change the way your swapfile is set up. i would suggest trying the "SetFile" utility included in the developer tools. i think "SetFile -V thing" lets you set the visibility of a file or folder. you will probably have to run it as root.
 
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