Microsoft DOS label command

Quick links

About label
Availability
Syntax
Examples
Possible issues

About label

Label is used to view or change the label of the computer disk drives.

Availability

The label.exe is an external command that is available in the below Microsoft operating systems.

All Versions of MS-DOS
Windows 95
Windows 98
Windows ME
Windows NT
Windows 2000
Windows XP
Windows Vista
Windows 7

Syntax

Creates, changes, or deletes the volume label of a disk.

LABEL [drive:][label]

Examples

label a: mydisk

This would label the disk currently in the drive to "mydisk", but will not label if your disk is write protected.

Possible issues

If your hard disk label contains ASCII or other extended characters and you are running MS-DOS 6.0 or lower if you run scandisk data or the entire hard drive can become corrupt.

Because scandisk is looking for corrupt or incorrect data, it is possible if the label has ASCII or any unrecognized characters that it will attempt to fix it. If scandisk attempts to fix your label it may remove all information and place it into a CHK file.

If hard drive has unrecognizable characters, unable to delete partition using fdisk.

Use label to recreate the label and then use fdisk to delete the partition after label created.