Ubuntu Manpage: fatlabel - set or get MS-DOS filesystem label or volume ID

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
       label  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 directory. 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. Absence 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 directory 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 dosfslabel updates label in both location.

Since version 4.2, fatlabel reads a FAT label only from the root directory (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 labels 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 decoding 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 Regional 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), Filipino,
                  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, Danish,  Dutch,  English  (Australia),
                  English (Belize), English (Canada), English (Caribbean), English (Ireland), English (Jamaica),
                  English  (New  Zealand),  English  (Trinidad  and  Tobago), English (United Kingdom), Faroese,
                  Finnish,  French,  Frisian,  Galician,  German,  Greenlandic,  Icelandic,  Indonesian,  Irish,
                  isiXhosa,  isiZulu,  Italian, K'iche, Lower Sorbian, 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, Polish, 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

HOMEPAGE

       The home for the dosfstools project is its GitHub project page.

AUTHORS

       dosfstools  were written by Werner Almesberger, Roman Hodek, and others.  Current maintainers are Andreas
       Bombe and Pali Rohár.

dosfstools 4.2                                     2021-01-31                                        FATLABEL(8)