fatlabel

FATLABEL(8)                 System Manager's Manual                FATLABEL(8)

NAME
       fatlabel - set or get MS-DOS filesystem label or volume ID

SYNOPSIS
       fatlabel [OPTIONS] DEVICE [NEW]

DESCRIPTION
       fatlabel  will  display  or change the volume label or volume ID on the
       MS-DOS filesystem located on DEVICE.  By  default  it  works  in  label
       mode.   It  can  be  switched  to  volume ID mode with the option -i or
       --volume-id.

       If NEW is omitted, then the existing label or volume ID is  written  to
       the  standard output.  A label can't be longer than 11 bytes and should
       be in all upper case for best compatibility.  An empty string or a  la-
       bel consisting only of white space is not allowed.  A volume ID must be
       given as a hexadecimal number (no leading "0x" or similar) and must fit
       into 32 bits.

OPTIONS
       -i, --volume-id
           Switch to volume ID mode.

       -r, --reset
           Remove label in label mode or generate new ID in volume ID mode.

       -c PAGE, --codepage=PAGE
           Use  DOS codepage PAGE to encode/decode label.  By default codepage
           850 is used.

       -h, --help
           Display a help message and terminate.

       -V, --version
           Show version number and terminate.

COMPATIBILITY and BUGS
       For historic reasons FAT label is stored in two different locations: in
       the  boot sector and as a special volume label entry in the root direc-
       tory.  MS-DOS 5.00, MS-DOS 6.22, MS-DOS 7.10, Windows  98,  Windows  XP
       and  also  Windows 10 read FAT label only from the root directory.  Ab-
       sence of the volume label in the root directory is interpreted as empty
       or none label, even if boot sector contains some valid label.

       When  Windows  XP or Windows 10 system changes a FAT label it stores it
       only in the root directory -- letting  boot  sector  unchanged.   Which
       leads  to  problems  when  a label is removed on Windows.  Old label is
       still stored in the boot sector but is removed from the root directory.

       dosfslabel prior to the version 3.0.7 operated  only  with  FAT  labels
       stored  in  the  boot sector, completely ignoring a volume label in the
       root directory.

       dosfslabel in versions 3.0.7-3.0.15 reads FAT labels from the root  di-
       rectory  and  in case of absence, it fallbacks to a label stored in the
       boot sector.  Change operation resulted in updating a label in the boot
       sector  and  sometimes also in the root directory due to the bug.  That
       bug was fixed in dosfslabel version 3.0.16 and since this version dosf-
       slabel updates label in both location.

       Since version 4.2, fatlabel reads a FAT label only from the root direc-
       tory (like MS-DOS and Windows systems), but changes a FAT label in both
       locations.   In  version 4.2 was fixed handling of empty labels and la-
       bels which starts with a byte 0xE5.  Also in  this  version  was  added
       support  for  non-ASCII  labels according to the specified DOS codepage
       and were added checks if a new label is valid.

       It is strongly suggested to not use dosfslabel prior to version 3.0.16.

DOS CODEPAGES
       MS-DOS and Windows systems use DOS (OEM) codepage for encoding and  de-
       coding  FAT  label.   In Windows systems DOS codepage is global for all
       running applications and cannot be configured explicitly.   It  is  set
       implicitly by option Language for non-Unicode programs available in Re-
       gional and Language Options via Control Panel.   Default  DOS  codepage
       for  fatlabel is 850.  See following mapping table between DOS codepage
       and Language for non-Unicode programs:

       Codepage   Language
         437      English (India), English (Malaysia),  English  (Republic  of
                  the   Philippines),   English  (Singapore),  English  (South
                  Africa), English (United States), English  (Zimbabwe),  Fil-
                  ipino,   Hausa,  Igbo,  Inuktitut,  Kinyarwanda,  Kiswahili,
                  Yoruba
         720      Arabic, Dari, Persian, Urdu, Uyghur
         737      Greek
         775      Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian
         850      Afrikaans, Alsatian, Basque, Breton, Catalan, Corsican, Dan-
                  ish,  Dutch,  English (Australia), English (Belize), English
                  (Canada), English (Caribbean),  English  (Ireland),  English
                  (Jamaica),  English (New Zealand), English (Trinidad and To-
                  bago), English (United Kingdom), Faroese,  Finnish,  French,
                  Frisian,  Galician,  German, Greenlandic, Icelandic, Indone-
                  sian, Irish, isiXhosa, isiZulu, Italian, K'iche, Lower  Sor-
                  bian,  Luxembourgish,  Malay, Mapudungun, Mohawk, Norwegian,
                  Occitan,  Portuguese,  Quechua,  Romansh,   Sami,   Scottish
                  Gaelic,   Sesotho  sa  Leboa,  Setswana,  Spanish,  Swedish,
                  Tamazight, Upper Sorbian, Welsh, Wolof
         852      Albanian, Bosnian (Latin), Croatian, Czech, Hungarian,  Pol-
                  ish, Romanian, Serbian (Latin), Slovak, Slovenian, Turkmen
         855      Bosnian (Cyrillic), Serbian (Cyrillic)
         857      Azeri (Latin), Turkish, Uzbek (Latin)
         862      Hebrew
         866      Azeri  (Cyrillic),  Bashkir,  Belarusian, Bulgarian, Kyrgyz,
                  Macedonian, Mongolian,  Russian,  Tajik,  Tatar,  Ukrainian,
                  Uzbek (Cyrillic), Yakut
         874      Thai
         932      Japanese
         936      Chinese (Simplified)
         949      Korean
         950      Chinese (Traditional)
         1258     Vietnamese

SEE ALSO
       fsck.fat(8), mkfs.fat(8)

HOMEPAGE
       The  home  for  the  dosfstools  project  is  its  GitHub  project page
       <https://github.com/dosfstools/dosfstools>.

AUTHORS
       dosfstools were  written  by  Werner  Almesberger  <werner.almesberger@
       lrc.di.epfl.ch>,  Roman Hodek <Roman.Hodek@informatik.uni-erlangen.de>,
       and others.  Current maintainers are Andreas Bombe <aeb@debian.org> and
       Pali Rohar <pali.rohar@gmail.com>.

dosfstools 4.2                    2021-01-31                       FATLABEL(8)