How to name/label a partition or volume on Linux

Labeling partitions or volumes is a file system feature. There two main tools which can do the job of naming or renaming partition labels. Namely they are tune2fs and e2label. Both tools are part of e2fsprogs and are used to solely on ext2/ext3/ext4 file systems.

Both above mentioned tools will do the job of labeling your partitions or volumes where the only difference is that e2label is dedicated solely for partition or volume labeling. As it was already mentioned these tools will work only on ext2/ext3/ext4 file systems, that is you cannot label disk or partition or volume which does not have ext2 or ext3 or ext4 file system. does not

To display a partition label use e2label:

# e2label /dev/sda1 

#

If you do not see any output produced by e2label command the label for the partition or volume is not yet set. To set a partition volume label run:

# e2label /dev/sda1 Boot
OR
# tune2fs -L Boot /dev/sda1 

Both above commands will set partition label of /dev/sda1 block device to Boot. Please note that the maximum label length is 16 bytes that is 16 characters. Let's check the partition label name again:

# e2label /dev/sda1 
Boot

To list label name for all partitions or volumes you may try to use blkid command:

# blkid
/dev/sda5: UUID="f2756986-3749-4bd3-a6e5-f6a867cb4ebb" TYPE="swap" 
/dev/sda1: UUID="60254c19-67c0-404b-9743-1b8b7f0b11cb" TYPE="ext4" LABEL="Boot"

It is also possible to label your partition during a file system creation. For example you can also set partition label with mkfs command. For example the below command will create a ext4 filesystem while it will also set a partition label name to ROOT.

# mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1 -L ROOT

Please note that tha above command must not be used on existing partitions with a file system as it will destroy your data. Lastly, you can remove a partition label name by supplying an empty string to either of the above tools:

# e2label /dev/sda1 ""
or 
# tune2fs -L "" /dev/sda1