If you are using removable disks such as USB pendrives, USB harddisks or Firewire disks and would like to have them mounted under /media/drivename (which does happen automatically with Ubuntu), you might want to label them so they always show up with the same name instead of disk, disk-1 and so fourth.
If you label a drive it will always mount using the same name, which facilitates using them with scripts and the like. I use an external Firewire disk for my system backup using BackupPC.
I use an XFS filesystem on that disk. To label it you use the following commands (requires the xfstools package):
This will list you the current label. To label the disk write
You can verify using your operation with
To label disks containing ext2, ext3 or ext4 you use the e2label program and the mtools package for FAT16/32 volumes. more information can be found here.