How to change your Drive Icon

Apr

30th

How to change your Drive Icon

Author: luq | Files under hardware, software, tips, tutorials

Fed up of the default drive icon you see in every computer? Then change it! You can give each of your partitions on your computer a unique drive icon to denote what the drive stores or just a random icon if your partitions aren’t necessarily classified in any order and guess what? You can follow this same procedure to change the icon of your portable device too! Which means you will have a unique icon at any computer you use your portable device on.

First I’ll show you how you can do this with an application as software always simplify the process. The utility you can use is Disk Heal which is a simple utility I developed. You can download it from here. Once you download the application open it and go to the ‘Tweak’ window. Click on ‘Appearance Tweaks’ and at the bottom you can change your icon. All you have to do is type the letter of the drive (portable or internal) and select your preferred icon by clicking ‘browse’, once you’ve got a suitable icon click ‘ok’ and then restart the computer if the drive is an internal one or re-insert the device if the drive is a portable one and voila, you are done!

Bear in mind you can’t change the icon again without restoring defaults which you can find next to the ‘OK’ button or else you will get an ‘invalid path’ error. (A little thing I need to fix)

Apart from that, the application performs plenty of other tiny, useful tweaks as well so be sure to check the application out even if you prefer changing your icon manually (below).

Well, it doesn’t get easier to do this than explained above using the application but if you like a bit of a challenge (it’s no big deal really) you can do it manually.

First, select your desired icon. Copy the icon to the parent directory of the drive you want to configure (eg: C:/icon.ico). Next go to My Computer > Tools > Folder Options > View and make sure ‘hide extensions for known file types’ is unchecked. Now create a new text file in the parent directory of the same drive and rename it to ‘autorun.inf’. Open the file and paste the following:

[Autorun]
icon=[file name of icon].ico

Save the file, now re-insert the drive if it’s a portable file or restart the computer if it’s an internal drive and you are done!

Don’t forget to go back to My Computer > Tools > Folder Options > View and check ‘hide extensions for known file types’ again.

You might also want to go to the file properties of ‘Autorun.inf’ and your icon and give them the ‘hidden’ attribute to keep your drive’s parent drectory clean.

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13 responses. Wanna say something?

Yesbos
Apr 30, 2008 at 20:52:20

cool…same theme with my blog..made in Malaysia..
Yesbos’s last blog post..Music Video & Picture Search Engine

[Reply]

luq reply on April 30, 2008 9:04 pm:

yeah..thanks to eches..thanks for the comment!

[Reply]

Vending Machine Man
May 1, 2008 at 02:10:02

Just FYI for Mac users, copy the icon you want to use, Get Info on the target file, click the icon at the top and paste. Your icon will stay with the drive.

Vending Machine Man’s last blog post..Chicago Vending Machines for Sale

[Reply]

luq reply on May 1, 2008 9:36 am:

thanks for the info vending machine man.

[Reply]

Gaming Freak
May 1, 2008 at 15:08:21

Quick Question before I download it, does it work on Vista (I know, poor me)

Gaming Freak’s last blog post..eVGA e-GeForce 9800 GTX | Cheap and Fast High End Gaming Graphics Card

[Reply]

luq reply on May 1, 2008 5:59 pm:

yeah..it should..there are tiny bugs with the application..atleast that’s what users tell me with vista but when i check the supposed bugs its perfectly fine…yeah poor u..:D..

[Reply]

Gaming Freak reply on May 1, 2008 9:55 pm:

Downloaded, great little tool
Regarding vista, I only bought it because crysis was about to come out while I was building my new pc. Hoping that DX10 would be brilliant…. well it isn’t that much better than DX9c

Gaming Freak’s last blog post..Asus Striker II Formula | High End Gaming Motherboard with Tripple SLI Support 780i Chipset

[Reply]

luq reply on May 1, 2008 11:21 pm:

yeah..who wouldn’t think its brilliant with the description they gave it..”life like characters..more real”..blah blah..hehehe..

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Genesis Bible
Jun 18, 2008 at 02:14:58

quite actually , i was tired of it . thanks for the info on how to change it !

[Reply]

windows forum
Jul 20, 2008 at 20:35:08

Nice little software app. and it’s FREE. I downloaded it does seem to work just fine on windows vista. I’ll be sure to pass this one around. Thank you.

[Reply]