GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 576616
Cannot set label of fat32 partition with dosfstools
Last modified: 2013-05-16 11:38:52 UTC
Please describe the problem: Trying to use gparted to set the label of a fat32 partition on a USB drive. The "Label" option is greyed out. Model: SanDisk U3 Contour (scsi) Disk /dev/sdb: 8213MB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: msdos Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 1 29.7kB 8201MB 8201MB primary fat32 lba System is running Fedora 10. I'm running the KDE desktop. Steps to reproduce: Actual results: Expected results: Does this happen every time? Other information:
To label a FAT16 or FAT32 file system, you need to have the mtools package installed. See http://gparted.sourceforge.net/features.php Do you have mtools installed?
Ah, that's what it needs. My system did have dosfstools so I guess I just assumed it would use that.
When I last looked, dosfstools did not provide the ability to label an already existing fat16 or fat32 partition. If this has changed please let me know and I can investigate changing GParted to use dosfstools for labelling instead of mtools. Closing this bug and marking it with a resolution of "NOTABUG".
dosfstools now has dosfslabel as of 3.0.0. Seems like gparted could make use of either if present.
Thank you Orion for the information about dosfslabel. The command dosfslabel will be considered for use in a future release of GParted. This would remove the dependency for mtools, which is used only for labelling fat16 and fat32 partitions.
With dosfstools v3.0.5 there appears to be a problem with the dosfslabel command. Specifically, dosfslabel only changes the volume label in one of two known locations in the FAT file system. See the following bug report for more details: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=506786 RedHat also has a bug report on this problem: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=503228 This problem needs to be fixed before considering using the dosfslabel command in Gparted.
It would appear that the dosfslabel command was fixed with dosfstools-3.0.7: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=559985
Forum user mwk has written a detailed post regarding FAT16/32 file system volume labels, and how these work with Windows, mlabel, and dosfslabel: Partition Label: only capital letters? http://gparted-forum.surf4.info/viewtopic.php?pid=24646#p24646
Forum user mwk has added another post to the previous post in comment #8. It appears that lowercase volume labels do cause problems with the DOS operating system: MS-DOS: Unable to Change Volume Label http://support.microsoft.com/kb/71715/en-us
I think we should close this RESOLVED/NOTABUG. Initial question of can't label fat32 was resolved by installing the required mtools. Following investigation concluded dosfslabel has too many issues to be used to label fat file systems.