Changing the manufacturer friendly name for external USB drive

[CarrahaG]

Hi,

Is there a way to modify the manufacturer friendly name for an external USB Seagate Freeagent Go drive?

The reason we need to do this is that we are using VMware workstation which requires you to disconnect the external usb drives from the menu when removing them from the guest OS. However, we have several freeagent drives connected in the guest OS and they all show the same friendly name in the menu so we really do not know which to disconnect.

 

[flyboytim]

Do you mean the disk label?
Right-click and select the properties of the removable disk in (My) Computer, and change the name in the box. OK and wait for a while for any writing to be done to the drive. Remove USB Device. Plug in somewhere else to check if label change has registered.

 

[CarrahaG]

Hi

No I do not mean the disk label. If you go under the device manager under Disk Drives, you will see the Device Friendly Name. I want to be able to change that friendly name.

 

[BadBigBen]

that "friendly name" is controlled by the driver INF file, so changing that will change all drive names... afaik...

as USB devices are hooked up, the OS detects this and sends a query to the new device asking it to identify itself, which it does by supplying the VEN&DEV #'s (which are hard coded).

The OS then looks at the registry to see if the device was attached before (driver is installed already) or if it is a new device, at which it will compare all the INF files until if finds a match or not. When it does not find a match it will prompt you to take action in installing a driver...

similar devices may sport the same "friendly name", but are slightly different, so first thing you need to check, is to see if all those USB drives are the same to the VEN&DEV numbers, if they are then you are out of luck...





Ben
"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."
How to ask a question, when posting them to a professional forum.
Only ask questions with yes/no answers if you want "yes" or "no"

 

[flyboytim]

Embedded within the firmware of USB devices is a vendor ID and product ID. Each time a removable USB device is plugged in, entries are written to the registry, such as:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\EMDMgmt\_??_USBSTOR#Disk&Ven_Easy&Prod_Disk&Rev_1100#AA04012800007575&0#{53f56307-b6bf-11d0-94f2-00a0c91efb8b}_1852775073]

Appears as Easy Disk in Device manager and VMWare VM Removable Devices.

The string is parsed by a program which strips out the bits (&Ven_xxx&Prod_XXX) I have made bold and presents them as the "Friendly Name", and adds a number for subsequent devices of the identical type in the device manager display.

I therefore don't think that the "Friendly Name" is editable. It may be worth contacting VMWare requesting that they identify removable storage volumes by their Volume Label, which is user editable (but not in the case of CD & DVD volumes), rather than the potentially confusing "Friendly Name".