How to Rename a Drive for Use with Visionary 8

Visionary 8 needs to have a unique label for any drives that are used for case materials.

Adding a drive label will not affect anything on your computer.  And if your drive is already labeled, you do not need to do anything.

This only applies to local drives on the computer.  Almost by definition, all networked drives are already labeled.  (Further information:  a network drive mapped to a computer drive letter is done as \\servername\sharename.  In this instance, the drive label is the "sharename".)

That said, to apply a unique label to a local drive, use Windows Explorer or My Computer to view all your drives.  Right-click on the specific drive (most likely c:) and choose Rename.  (If your drive is already named "Local Drive", that really means it does not have a drive label.)  You can enter any name you wish, as long as there are no spaces and Windows allows the letter/number combination.

Whatever you choose, ensure that it is unique on this computer.  Press the Enter key.

You may be asked to provide administrator permission to complete this process.

For the propeller heads out there.

Drive labeling is used for several purposes.  First, consider if your optical drive is labeled D:\.  Even when you switch disks in it, it is still named D:\ and the program has no idea if the correct disk is in the drive.

Secondly, drive labeling is also used by people who generate Image Load Files, as it allows for the use of drive-independent information.

For the network geeks out there.

As you can see from the definition of a mapped network drive and the need for unique drive labels on a computer; all network "sharenames" mapped for use by Visionary 8 must be unique.  This scenario can be caused by having two or more "servernames" with the same "sharename".  While completely valid by network theory (they are both unique and valid), this would cause an issue with Visionary.  In our own network environment we have multiple physically separate RAID drives.  Rather than using "\\NAS01\data" and "\\NAS02\data", we used "\\NAS01\RAID01" and "\NAS02\RAID02".