06.011 Can I assign names to my DOS 3.3 diskettes?
Description
This article is from the Apple II Csa2 FAQ, by Jeff Hurlburt with numerous contributions by others.
06.011 Can I assign names to my DOS 3.3 diskettes?
DOS 3.3 has no way to name a diskette "NARF", "DISK 100", "DATA DISK ",
etc. which DOS will recognize. You can, however, 'name' a diskette by giving it
a Volume Number in the range 1-255.
Volume Number is set at the time a diskette is initialized. For example
...
INIT HELLO, V19
INITs a diskette as Volume 19. If no number is specified, the default Volume
Number used by INIT is 254.
Several DOS commands can specify a Volume Number in order to decide
whether a diskette is the right one for some application.
LOAD NARF, D2, V5 ... for example, will not load NARF from Drive 2 unless
the diskette's Volume Number is 5.
A few early pieces of commercial software used Volume numbering; and, new
users often like to Volume number their diskettes. In practice, this turns out
to be a bad idea. A diskette with any Volume Number except the default (254) is
often difficult to work with via standard utilities. Also, once a diskette is
INITed for a certain Volume Number, changing the number is difficult because
Volume Number is embedded in each Sector. (i.e. You'll end up having to copy
every file to another diskette and, then,
re-INITing the source diskette to the new Volume Number.)
Besides, there's an easy way to give descriptive names to your DOS 3.3
diskettes which will not interfer with normal access. Just write the name
("GAMES DISK ONE", or whatever) to a Text file named, say, "DISK.ID".
DOS 3.3 will not know about the name or show it in a CATALOG. However,
your programs will be able to find out the name by just reading DISK.ID.
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