Cannot rename a volume

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Level 1

10 points

Cannot rename a volume

I am running Ventura. I have an external drive with several volumes on it. One of them I cannot rename. The other volumes I can rename by right-clicking them in the finder sidebar and the menu will have a 'rename xx" item in it; this volume does not have that item. This and one other volume are APFS formatted and contain releases of the OS. The one that will not change its name contains a copy of Ventura; the other contains an older OS. The only difference I see between them is that the one that will not change its name shows both a system volume and a data volume, while the older OS whose name I can change just shows a single volume.

Another backup disk has the same 2 volumes but here the current OS shows only 1 volume while the older one shows both a system and data volume. In this case the older one will not allow its name to change.

The current OS on both backup disks appear to be backing up fine.

Anyone know why some system volumes are in two pieces and other in one, and why the 2-piece versions will not allow their names to be changed (or how to do it)??

iMac 27″ 5K, macOS 13.7

Posted on Nov 7, 2024 12:59 PM

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Answer 1

MartinR

Level 7

21,685 points

Nov 7, 2024 1:15 PM in response to Karl999

Apple made many changes to the system volume layout in the past few releases of macOS.

Up to macOS Mojave there was a single system volume (Macintosh HD). Starting with Catalina there are 2 related volumes (Macintosh HD & Macintosh HD Data) that are firmlinked by the system into a "Volume Group" that appears in the Finder as a single volume with the default name Macintosh HD.

You cannot rename them because they are secured by the system.

If you provide disk details we might be able to give more insight. You can do this in Terminal by running the command

diskutil list

and copying the results to a reply in this thread.

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Answer 2

Nov 7, 2024 11:19 PM in response to Karl999

Personally I always carefully name a boot disk and stick to it because renaming seems to be such a mess. For many years I have named the internal boot disk as "HD" and any external boot volume as something like "macOS_10.14", "macOS_15_test" etc (I avoid spaces (and high-ascii characters) so they do not have to be escaped in Terminal commands).

How do I rename the startup disk? - Apple Community

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Answer 3

HWTech

Level 9

60,464 points

Nov 11, 2024 12:20 PM in response to Karl999

Yes, Apple has really messed things up with linking of two volumes to appear as one. After six years it is still broken....actually at one time Apple did have it working correctly when you went to rename the boot volume when using Disk Utility, but promptly broke it again with another update patch.

If you absolutely want or need to rename a boot volume, then use Disk Utility to do it. If the System & Data volumes have the same base name, then renaming the "Volume Group" should automatically rename the sub volumes as well. If one of those two volumes has a different base name, then you will most likely need to rename the base name of the wrong volume and then rename the Volume Group. Once they are aligned, then changing the Volume Group name should automatically update the actual APFS volumes within that Volume Group (at least the last time I tried it some time last year).

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