Give external USB (ext4) drive a short name

Question

When I plug in my USB hard drive that is formatted with an ext4 partition, the drive is mounted as expected, but at a path that contains the long UUID of the disk; something like:

/media/a1f2e5f6-a9bc-dd2a-c2c9-1f48c39b39ee

Is there a way to automount the drive at a path that is shorter and more snappy? e.g.

/media/my_external_hd

Answer 1

Give the filesystem on your disk a label with the e2label command. For example: if your filesystem is on /dev/hdc1, run sudo e2label /dev/hdc1 my_external_hd. I think you may need to unmount the filesystem with sudo umount /media/a1f2e5f6-a9bc-dd2a-c2c9-1f48c39b39ee before this will work.

To find out what device your mounted filesystem is on, the command mount will give you a list.

Answer 2

If you prefer not to use the command line, the Disk Utility (should be installed by default on 12.04) also has this option. Select the device and then select Edit Filesystem Label. When the device is next mounted it will appear under this name instead of the UUID.