Chrome OS users, you can file this one under finally! In a code commit by the Chromium team who lead up the Chrome OS platform effort in Google, the ability to change the name of an attached external drive or USB stick looks to be a Ctrl+Enter keystroke away in an upcoming release of the platform.
The change comes via a new flag that is enabled in the platform, more specifically in the Files app. That flag allows for the ability to change the name of a drive to be added to the Format Device menu or through the Ctrl+Enter shortcut.
As a result, when ‘–enable-external-drive-rename’ flag is enabled you should be able to see rename option under ‘Format device’ in context menu or through shortcut Ctrl+Enter. Second visible change is decoupled external drive name and its mount point. Now you should also see entries with the exact same name if you use two or more partitions/disks with the exact same name.
You can read the full outline of the code commit here if you are interested.
In reading the comments back on the code change, as of yesterday, this project was marked as abandoned – but not in the way you are thinking. It was abandoned as smaller change lists have been created for the various components of Chrome OS that would need to be touched to make this change be realized. It is not uncommon for large, chunky projects like this to be broken down into smaller components. The benefit of reading this change however is that you get the full scope of the project on one page.
So when will we actually see this change in Chrome OS? The short answer is: No clue. 🙂
It has been committed which is a positive in that it isn’t an experiment or trial. If I had to guess, I would suggest we will see it in the canary channel over the course of Build 62 or 63 with a later release in the Stable channel. In other words, don’t get overly excited just yet.
The link is to a code commit that is marked as ABANDONED.
with no links indicating that “smaller changes” are being pursued or implemented. So all that commited means is that this is a piece of code that has been added to a library as complete, and may or may not ever be incorporated into Chrome OS.