I can’t manage to sort my hard drives in the order I want. I’ve tried every possible and imaginable way… alphabetical, numerical, I even went into GNOME Disks and played with all the labels and settings. Online tutoring doesn’t work either… I don’t know if it’s a bug, but I’ve never encountered this problem before. I need help.
Thanks in advance.
This is most likely not a hardware issue, but a change in how GNOME Files handles drive ordering in the sidebar.
Recent versions seem to sort mounted drives using internal device names or mount order instead of the filesystem labels, so changing labels in Disks may no longer affect the order like it did before.
A few things you can try:
1. Reboot after changing labels, in case the old names are cached.
2. Check if the drives are mounted automatically from /etc/fstab, because mount order can matter.
3. Mount them to custom folders such as /mnt/Data, /mnt/Backup, etc.
4. Open those folders in Files and press Ctrl+D to add bookmarks. That gives you a cleaner custom sidebar layout.
5. If custom ordering is essential, Nemo or Dolphin offer more flexibility than GNOME Files.
So in short: probably not a bug with your disks, but a limitation/change in Nautilus sidebar behavior
Thanks for the explanations and solutions, but unfortunately nothing I’ve tried works for me, or I just don’t have the knowledge to apply them correctly.
I changed the names again and played with the labels in Gnome Disks, I even tried to make all disks mount automatically, but it still doesn’t work.
The idea of putting them in bookmarks is nice, and in the list I can organize them however I want just by dragging them, but there’s no option to mount them, so I still have to keep the other disk list below, which is just a mess…
I tried Dolphin, but I don’t understand why sometimes Dolphin and Gnome Files don’t give me the same result in Properties when I check the size of the same file…
It looks like I just discovered another problem…
As for /etc/fstab, I can see the file with what must be an entry for each disk, but my knowledge stops there…
Why make such a basic feature so complicated 
I’ve personally tried all of your suggestions and none have worked unfortunately… Such a basic feature having been removed really pushes a person away from Gnome as we are talking about an essential here, its simple ordering of your own disks.
- Reboot doesn’t work or change anything.
- In my case drives are mounted automatically and in the proper order, doesn’t change anything in Gnome Files.
- Does not work, comes up with an error when done every time i try to open and/or mount them.
- Does work and i am able to order them in the sidebar as they’re now in my bookmarks but it makes the sidebar a mile long and you get everything in duplicate, one set ordered the other disordered, not really a feasible solution.
5.Both Nemo and Dolphin have this basic feature working perfectly but i like and want to use Gnome Files, i might end up on KDE however if basic things like this just work on them.
Thank you for the suggestions they where good and worth a try but ultimately they don’t currently work or require weird compromise. I hope they fix this soon as its been a long time now since this stopped working and we are talking about the most basic of features, i don’t understand how they could justify removing/changing it to begin with.