I've successfully repartitioned an old 1Tb hdd from an old machine to use as an external drive for backups.


I have an internal 2Tb drive in my machine and it has uses the UUID as it's labelSee screenshot as well.


Now I've used e2label in the past on usb sticks and I'm 99.9% sure it's non-destructive, but before I risk it on a 2Tb drive with loads of files I want to keep, and too big to backup am I okay to do thischeers

Attached Thumbnails

 

The label is uncorrelated to the data that you store on the partition. It is just an additional "convenience-name" you can assign to any partition and change it as you like.

You can mount a drive with mapping by UUID, dev-path, lvm, disk-id. Changing the label-string does not mean anything when you don't mount the partition by using its label automatically.

So when you don't use a fixed config like "LABEL=TWOTBDRIVE" instead of "/dev/sdb5" in your fstab the label is not relevant anyways and even if you change it to something different you can still change it again or adjust your configuration.

1 members found this post helpful.

Auge is right.
But be aware of the used terms, when searching for this:
You can indeed always label your volume, or filesystem.
On de GPT disk you can also name your partition. Even if it contains no filesystem at all.
For mounting (like in fstab) you can use the volume label, but not the partition name.
What's the use of a partition name then? Well, not so much... If you have an encrypted filesystem like veracrypt on it, you will not see any label without mounting. But you can read the partition name though.
Perhaps others see more use for it...?
If you use "gnome-disks", you see both options very clearly. And you can change both of them from there. Even on a mounted volume!
You can lists all volume names with the command blkid (as root).
But as Auge says: be aware, if you use a fixed config like "LABEL=TWOTBDRIVE" instead of "/dev/sdb5" in fstab.

The partition name is the GPT-partition-label and was not part of the question. Here we talked about filesystem-labels for ext modified by the OP with "e2label".


For remmilou and because this place is meant to help people learn something: There is no definition that "name" is always used for the partition-label and "label" is for the filesystem-label. For example on your debian10: systemd and udev use the term "filesystem-label" to populate "/dev/disk/by-partlabel/" according to rules in "/lib/udev/rules.d/60-persistent-storage.rules". There the partition-name, that is the gpt-partition-label is called ID_FS_LABEL, although it is the external "GPT-PARTITION-NAME" defined as the last 72 Bytes of "GUID partition entry format".

I like to use this partition-label on multiboot-workstations with different OS that understand gpt but may not have support for the filesystems of their neighbours.

I try to show what I mean using the debian10 I have here myself:

There is a lot of use in these names, because you can have a custom external label for partitions without needing to open the fs on that partition. When I change disks from one controller/port to another in the same system the os has no problem with that because of using the UUID in fstab and I have no problem to find/change something because my custom-names are there and in our case: we can even mount them by partition-name with the symlink to the device provided by the udev-rule, in my case the Debian-Root-Partition with /dev/disk/by-partlabel/deb

If the disk is not listed in fstab, most systems will automount the drive at /media/username/disklabel, if automount is enabled. That makes most things more convenient, and I assume that's what the OP wants.

It's not listed in /etc/fstab

Attached Thumbnails

 

That's what I was assuming. If there is no label, the drive will be automounted using the UUID. If there is a label, it will be mounted using the label. At least for the DEs I've used. No idea about Gnome, I avoid that at all cost.