How does one change the UUID of a Volume on Mac OS X 10.6?

Question

Does anyone know how to change the UUID of a Volume? The background for this question is that I have a duplicate UUID issue:

I have /Volumes/OldMacHD with a UUID of XYZ. I have /Volumes/Mirror1 with a UUID of XYZ (same UUID! I bet that's because OldMacHD USED to be part of this mirror). I got these UUIDs via 'diskutil info /dev/thatdisknumber | grep UUID'.

I'd like to change the UUID of 'Mirror1'.

I discovered by chance the 'hfs.util' utility, since these are HFS volumes after all. The man page for hfs.util says that if you issue the -s flag, this changes the UUID. However, if you type hfs.util all by itself, it doesn't show you the -s option at all, just every option besides that! Grr. I tried it anyway:

sudo /System/Library/Filesystems/hfs.fs/hfs.util -s /dev/disk4 (the raid volume).  

Nothing happens. No error message, no success message. UUID exactly the same. I tried it while the volume was unmounted.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

the syntax for hfs.util appears to just be the devicename, not the path including /dev/

i.e.

Server:~ admin$ mount
(...)
/dev/disk1s2 on /Volumes/Backup (hfs, local, journaled)
(...)
Server:~ admin$ sudo /System/Library/Filesystems/hfs.fs/hfs.util -s rdisk1s2

make sure to unmount the drive before the hfs.util -s and mount afterwards.

use the "raw" device i.e. rdisk1s2 instead of disk1s2

diskutil info will not show the new uuid until you remount.

Answer 2

All the examples I can find just take the device BSD name, not the full path to a device file. Have you tried that?

Answer 3

/dev/disk4 isn't an HFS volume, it's an entire drive, including the partition table and any number of separate volumes (partitions) on the drive. /dev/disk4s0 would be an example of a volume. Find the correct identifier for the actual HFS volume you care about, and try doing hfs.util -s on that.