Windows 10: Can't Rename Drive Label in Windows 10

I have named my USB flash drives (G,H) in Disk Management, but they continue to be unnamed in Windows Explorer.





I've tried everything in this tutorial: How to Rename Drive Label in Windows 10 without success. The only thing that does work is to set a default label for each drive in the registry.





I've read several Win7 articles stating various USB problems can be resolved by uninstalling all the controllers under Universal Serial Bus controllers in Device Manager. Then restart and let Windows reinstall them as needed.





Question: Would this be a safe/reasonable thing to do in Windows 10? Any other suggestions?

Thanks in advance,
Mike

HP ProBook 450 G3
Windows 10 Pro 64-bit (upgraded from Windows 7 Pro 64-bit)
Intel Core i7-6500U (Skylake)
16GB DDR3 PC3-12800

:)

 

Volume Labels when Dual Bootong

Is There a way to rename or use different Volume labels when Dual Booting to a different Hard Drive?

I have Windows 10 64 bit and Windows 10 32 bit on my computer.

If can't that's OK but I would like to know.

Thanks for any information you can provide.

 

Volume Labels when Dual Bootong

Hi Michael,

You can right-click a drive and select Rename to give it a more descriptive label, like “Windows 10”.

Let us know if you need further assistance.

 

Hi, try rt clicking the drive in file explorer.
Properties
Then fill in the label name (yellow field in my screenshot).




Note the name reverts to Removable Drive if you rt click the named drive, and click Eject.

(The one useful trick with removable drives if you use them for backups e.g. in Disk Management is to assign a drive letter late in the alphabet so they are most probably assigned the same letter next time (assuming nothing is using that drive letter) ).

 

Thanks. But as I said, all 5 options in the tutorial I referenced failed. That was Option #2.

 

Try the steps in the jpg. You will lose all data though so backup first if required.

also could try here How to a Flash Drive, SD Card, or Internal Drive to Fix Partition and Capacity Problems

HTH

 

You can of course try uninstalling all the controllers under Universal Serial Bus controllers in Device Manager as you say. Whether that will help is trial and error of course. Good luck.

Basic question- were you previously able to assign labels to these drives, but now find you can't?

Note some had this problem in earlier builds of Win 10, and I found this comment: (Dec 16)

2014:

 

Have you tried a third party utility such as MiniTool Partition Wizard (free)?

 

I ran diskpart as suggested by @jl2509. This allowed me to name my removable USB drives via ThisPC Rename & Properties, Command Prompt, PowerShell and autorun.inf file. I elected to go with the autorun.inf file and created an icon for each drive. I formatted one drive NTFS and the other FAT32.

















Just what I wanted, until ... I restarted my laptop. Got the following error on restart: "An operating system wasn't found. Try disconnecting any drives that don't contain an operating system. Press any key to restart".

I removed the 2 USB drives and was able to restart the laptop. Pressing any key didn't work ... the only "key" that worked was the power button.

Did a little research and discovered what setting a partition as active means. So I inactivated them with the following diskpart commands:

list disk
select disk 1
list partition
select partition 1
inactive

All is good now. Thanks jl2509

 

Ah, sorry about that.
The active partition is for running windows from the USB drive. Thinks they are bootable
Just for reference, omit the line "Active" from the process supplied.

Good you are all fixed.

Cheers

 

I have a stand-alone offline Windows XP SP3 system. Occasionally I move data between my laptop and that system with a USB flash drive. I did this today with my newly formatted FAT32 drive. I could not eject the drive from the WinXP system (device busy), so I just removed the flash drive. When I inserted it back into the laptop, the original problem reoccurred. The drive was unnamed and the autorun.inf file was gone, at least not visible. When I tried to recreate the file, I got a dialog box saying the file already existed and asked if I wanted to replace it. But, no matter how many times I clicked [Yes], the same dialog box was re-displayed.

Any idea what's going on with my WinXP system?

 

Hi,

Sounds like a handle process is still accessing the usb drive, probably due to cache information that was not yet written to the disk. Try terminating the explorer process in the task manager or run powershell in admin mode and type taskkill /f /im explorer.exe

See then if you can eject the hardware
This may be a driver compatibility issue or just plain old process handler not releasing.

Back in the day, people rebooted the XP system to release as all handlig process were completed prior to shutdown/restart then remove before reboot.
Bit of a pain though....

Sorry i'm not that familiar with Windows XP now.
Difficult to say if the USB drive is actually 100% compatible with Windows XP too!

 

I changed the device policy on the WinXP system from Better performance to Quick removal to disable caching and was able to write to and successfully eject the flash drive on the WinXP system. But, when I inserted it back into my Win10 laptop, the problem returned ... no label or autorun.inf file. So the failure to eject wasn't the problem. I suspect it's a compatibility issue with WinXP and USB 3.0 flash drives. I've spent more time on this than it's worth ... I'll live with it.

Thanks for the help,
Mike