How do I rename a USB drive?

1. Open "Disks" application
2. Select the flash drive in the panel on the left
3. Press the Unmount button (should look like a "stop button")
4. Click on the gears icon ("More actions") and choose "Edit filesystem"

First, obtain the location of your USB drive:

sudo fdisk -l

Assuming that your device location is /dev/sdb1/:

You can safely check the current label without any side effects by issuing the following command:

sudo file /dev/sdb1 -s

Most USB sticks are formatted using FAT16/FAT32. To change the label via the prompt, use the mlabel command. The label of a FAT filesystem requires to be exactely 11 characters. No more, no less. When characters are omitted, spaces are added at the beginning, and seemingly random characters are appended at the end.

Install the mtools package (GNU Tools for MSDOS filesystems):

sudo apt-get install mtools

Then you might need to configure the mtools drives settings, hence add the following two lines to /etc/mtools.conf (you will need sudo to edit)

# second and third drives, first partition
drive u: file="/dev/sdb1"
drive v: file="/dev/sdc1"

Having saved, you should then be able to look at your USB drive in (say) /dev/sdb1 as drive u:

sudo mtools -v u:

(See comments ....) Then relabel:

sudo mlabel -i /dev/sdb1 -s ::"LABEL HERE "

For other filesystems (rarely used for USB sticks), see this page.

None of the given answers worked for me on my 14.10 system. I used gparted as described in https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RenameUSBDrive.

1. sudo apt-get install gparted
2. open gparted
3. choose the thumbdrive from the dropdown in the top-right corner
4. unmount the volume (right-click on drive)
5. right click and choose "label"
6. click on green tick to apply changes