Naming Cloned Volumes On External Drives

[Mojo]

A number of months ago I had a problem booting from cloned volumes on a couple of external drives. At the time Dave thought that something on my Macs really likes the clones to be named exactly the same as the original volume, so since then all volumes are named exactly the same. (Previously I could name external cloned volumes differently and booting from them was not a problem.)

Unfortunately, this has become something of a nightmare for me... Since all the volumes are named the same I sometimes have trouble figuring out which volume is which. This is coming up again because I recently installed SD! on a couple of Macs that belong to friends and the naming issue was cofusing to them too...

I am wondering if this problem can be solved by an SD! update or if someone can suggest a strategy for keeping things straight?

[dnanian]

Well, don't rename the drive until you need to start up from it, Mojo... this isn't strictly necessary for all configurations, but it was for yours, probably due to a startup item (or the like) that needed the same drive name.

Have you tried starting with a different drive name recently?

[Mojo]

No, I haven't tried it recently. When I get back home I'll see if it works...

I may be missing something here, so bear with me... If my normal boot drive should fail and I need to boot from a clone, how will I be able to change the name of the cloned boot drive in order for it to boot?

[dnanian]

You could do a quickie install of OSX on your internal drive to do it. You might be able to do it from the OSX install disc. Or, you could install Tiger to the internal and migrate from the drive without booting from it...

Note that, in most cases, the drive does not have to be named the same... there's something -- or there was something -- in your configuration that's requiring it...