Danger of manually changing name of external hard drive on a Mac?

[essdee]

Hi there - I recently needed to clone an external edit drive (G-Drive brand) for an AE to begin working with me. I initially gave the clone hard drive a slightly different name when I formatted it. I wasn't sure if I could have two hard drives with the same exact name mounted on my computer (Mac OS Catalina). So I copied all the original drives folders onto it, then ejected the original drive and tried opening the Premiere project in the hopes that everything would relink automatically (or I could easily manually link) to the cloned drive.

Premiere just kept crashing on the "Linking media" window.

So I opened the info panel for the cloned external hard drive in Finder and just manually changed the hard drive's name to be identical to the original edit drive, without reformatting it. And then the Premiere project opened and worked just fine.

Is there any danger to having manually changed the name of an external hard drive without reformatting? I seem to remember that was a no-no, but I can't find any info about it. Any insights appreciated! Thank you...

[Michael Grenadier · Accepted solution]

no issue with renaming a drive (at least in my experience).  when i clone a drive, I copy the name of the original drive and then name the target drive by copying the source drive name and adding X to the drive name.  Then it's very simple, just to delete the X and everything should link just fine.  Been doing this for years without issue.

[essdee]

Awesome, thank you for this response!