Powershell Function: Change-VolumeLabel

This posting continues with my series of articles that describes my Powershell environment by describing a function that I use to change volume labels on remote machines. A file with the function is available.

I wrote this function because I needed a way to change labels associated with volumes on remote machines. Earlier versions of this function were actually written in VBScript. I rewrote that old code in Powershell because I wanted more consistency with the "standard" Powershell command line switches and I am (slowly) moving away from all of my old VBScript programs.

Before I had a script, I would use RDP to connect to the remote machine, login and then use Windows Explorer to change the volume labels. This was a lot of effort for a small change. I use the volume label at one of my clients as a quick way to discern between SAN and non-SAN volumes by prepending "san" or "local" on the volume labels. When this convention was adopted, there were a fair number of old machines to go through. I also use this script when setting up new machines, so this function has gotten a workout.

This function is pretty straightforward. The function has the following key features:

1. It leverages WMI to do the dirty work.
2. It supports several of the "standard" Powershell command switches, namely "-verbose", "-confirm" and "-whatif". It does this by leveraging Jeffery Snover's "Should-Process" function. At a minimum, I try to support these three switches in all of my scripts.
3. If you don't specify a drive leter, the script prints a short report showing the drives that exist. This supports the notion that an administrator should be able to "explore" or "discover" an environment with powershell and make changes interactively. It sure beats remembering things.
   
4. There is one caveat with this script. It does not work with versions of Windows that pre-date Windows Server 2003. It seems that WMI did not provide the WIN32_VOLUME class prior to Windows Server 2003. If someone tries this funciton on Windows Vista, I'd love to hear if it works or not.
   

That's all I have for this post. For my next post, I will pick out another function from my set up and describe it.