** Mini-Guide: Change Disk Label Shown in OpenCore Picker **
Please do not quote this guide in its entirety. Post a link instead.
Purpose:
Changing the names of the disks that appear in OpenCore boot picker is a little bit tricky, but still quite doable. It requires booting into macOS Recovery partition. The complete procedure is presented below.
- Boot into Recovery and then carry out the remaining steps.
- To boot into Recovery, do the following:
- At OpenCore Picker press spacebar to reveal extra boot options.
- Select Recovery.
- If there are multiple versions of macOS installed, be sure to select the correct Recovery volume.
- Start by listing all drives in the system. Type the following in Terminal:
- Find the disk IDENTIFIER corresponding to the Preboot volume for your macOS SSD.
- In the screenshot below we see the following:
- Big Sur and Monterey are installed on the same physical disk, but in separate APFS Volumes. In this case, both of them share a single Preboot volume. disk2s3
- Catalina is installed on a separate physical disk and has its own Preboot volume. disk3s2
- Note: Each time the system restarts, disk identifiers (rightmost column in screenshot) can change.
- Let's mount the Preboot volume for Catalina (replace disk3s2 with your disk IDENTIFIER):
Bash:
cd /Volumes/Preboot/
ls -l
- You should see one or more directories whose names are UUIDs.
- Example of UUID: a9b6e929-6158-4042-9fd4-cefd5e3cb57d
- If there are multiple UUID directories, they belong to different versions of macOS. One of them will contain the disk label we want to change. So "cd" to each UUID subdirectory. It is possible to use wildcards. For the sample UUID above, we can type:
Bash:
cd a9b6*
cd System/Library/CoreServices
ls -al
- Now we should see a file called .disk_label.contentDetails
- Check whether that file contains the disk label that needs to be changed. If it does not then go back to previous step and "cd" to another UUID sub-directory.
Bash:
cat .disk_label.contentDetails
- If this is the file we wish to change, edit the file in vi as follows:
Bash:
vi .disk_label.contentDetails
- This file will contain only a single volume name. Simply change the name to whatever you like. As you can see here, I've used vi to change the name to Catalina 10.15.6:
- Save the file. In
vi
, press ESC to exit text-entry mode, then press : (colon key) followed by the letter x to save-and-exit. If warnings are received, try :w!
followed by :q
- Reboot.
How to Use "vi" to Replace Text
If you're not familiar with the
vi
editor, here are simple step-by-step instructions. The editor operates in two modes:
- Cursor / Movement mode (default)
- Insert (edit) mode -- after pressing lower-case "i" for insert. When the editor is in insert mode, we will see INSERT at the bottom of the screen.
- Have a look at these screenshots...
After typing
vi .disk_label.contentDetails
we will get this (assuming the current disk name is "Big Sur"). Let's assume we want to change the name to "Monterey".
The editor is in cursor/movement mode because the word INSERT does not appear at the bottom. We can use arrow keys to move around.
Here I've pressed the RIGHT arrow key three times...
Now I pressed the LEFT arrow key three times to go back to the 1st position and then I pressed lower case "x" 3 times to delete the letters "Big". Lower case "x" deletes the character under the cursor.
Now I pressed lower case "x" four more times to delete everything on the line:
Now that "Big Sur" has been removed, we can enter INSERT mode to begin typing the new name, Monterey. So we need to
press lower-case "i" for INSERT mode. Notice the word "-- INSERT --" has appeared at the bottom of the window.
Because we're in insert mode,
we can now begin typing. So we type "Monterey". We can press
Del key at any time to delete the character on the left if we make a typo.
Now we
must exit INSERT mode by pressing
ESC. Notice that "-- INSERT --" has gone away:
Now we're ready to save the changes. We press
: and then
w! as shown below. The moment we press
: the cursor moves to the bottom of the window to await commands. The command
w! means over-write the existing file.
Now the file has been saved so we are ready to quit. We type
: followed by
q for quit.
And we're done!