I'd like to change the icon for a hard drive on my system. I know it's possible, because one of my disks already has a different icon. I must have done it somehow, but I can't find the tip on how to do that.
There are two ways to create a drive-specific icon. The first step for both is to determine the full pathname of the file containing the icon you want, as well as the index of the icon within that file. To view the icons contained in an EXE or DLL file, right-click any shortcut that links to a file (as opposed to a system shortcut like My Computer) and choose Properties. On the Shortcut tab of the resulting dialog, click the Change Icon button. Click Browse and select the file whose icons you want to peruse. When you find the one you want, count off the icons to determine the correct index. Start in the top left corner with zero and count down each column, then to the right. For example, icon 12 in C:\ Windows\System32\Shell32.dll is a picture of a memory chip. Make a note of the full pathname of the file and the icon index, then click Cancel, and Cancel again—you don't actually want to change that shortcut's icon. The Microsoft Windows files moricons.dll and progman.exe, both found in C:\Windows\System32, also contain numerous icons.
One technique for assigning a drive-specific icon uses a file named Autorun.inf in the root directory of that drive. Launch Notepad and enter [autorun] on the first line. Enter ICON= on the second line, followed by the full pathname of the icon-holding file, a comma, and the icon index. It might look like this:
[autorun]
ICON=C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\SHELL32.DLL,12
Save the file as "C:\autorun.inf" (you need the quotes to prevent Notepad from appending the .txt extension). Now restart the computer. When you open Windows Explorer, the drive should display its new icon.
The other technique involves editing the Registry. Launch RegEdit from the Start menu's Run dialog and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\
CurrenTVersion\Explorer. If a subkey named driveicons is present, open it; if not, right-click in the right-hand pane, select New | Key and name the key driveicons. Under the driveicons key, find or create a subkey named C (or the letter of the drive whose icon you want to change). And under this C key find or create a subkey named DefaultIcon. Double-click the (Default) entry in the right-hand pane and set its value to the full pathname of the icon-holding file, a comma, and the icon index. Again you'll need to restart Windows.
If one of these techniques seems not to work for you, try the other. If you apply both to the same drive, the Autorun.inf file takes precedence.
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