On 31/01/2016 16:22, Peter F. Patel-Schneider wrote:
I believe that if you label the partitions, they will show up with the labels, just as USB sticks do. I also believe that you can use gparted to label the partitions. I do not believe that labelling the partitions will affect their behaviour under Windows.
Peter, useful suggestion. Doing this - indeed - changed the 'naming' of the two partitions showing on the desktop, and in File Manager. It's not quite perfect yet, I'll explain below.
For the record and to assist any Windows users who come to Fedora, unless the partitions have been 'named' by windows, Fedora will list them as '20 GB Volume' or some such, as Peter advised. F23/XFCE includes gparted which will scan all partitions and the Windows partitions, in this case, will show as 'unlabelled'. (Actually, on my machine, the Windows 'Recovery' partition did show up with a name.) gparted will let you rename these partitions but Windows does not like system adjustments 'appearing' that it does not do, itself, because it thinks such might be a symptom of a security problem. So I did not use gparted to change the labels, but instead did so after rebooting and loading Windows.
For completeness, here is what I did in Windows (XP in my case). In Windows disk file manager, 'Explorer' or 'My Computer', I selected each partition that I wanted to label and, using 'right-click', I selected 'properties'. On the 'General' tab of the properties dialog there is an entry field adjacent to a graphic of a disk drive. This field contains the name (or 'label') of the partition; it was empty in my case. Entering a name here means that the partition always has this label or name, regardless of which OS is used to read it. I changed my C drive to say 'WinC', and my D drive to say 'WinD'. On rebooting back into Fedora 23, the two Windows partitions appeared on the desktop, and in File manager, as WinC and WinD.
Almost perfect. I tend to use midnight commander a lot and, in F14, I knew where to look for the WinC and WinD drives because I would have mounted them under /mnt, /mnt/WinD as example. After naming the partitions I could not find them in mc, anywhere. They were not under /home/ron, nor under /mnt nor /media. Yet they must have been somewhere because File Manager could use them. Eventually, I noticed that File manager listed the 'path' where it found these partitions -
/var/run/media/ron/..
Of course this will work for me, but I won't easily remember this - I use this machine only intermittently, mainly when I'm offsite.
Is there a way I can ask fedora to mount these at /mnt/WinD, for example? Or, could I make a symlink at /mnt/WinD, to point to /var/run/media/ron/WinD, and ensure that read and write works across it? (I'm not exactly sure how symlinks work.)
Peter, thanks for the suggestion, it is much more suitable for our use now because we can see which icon and name is which Windows drive.
Ron