How to Change the Default Icon for Removable Drives
If you are bored seeing the default look of removable drives in Windows, here is a simple tutorial on how to change the default look. The Removable drive looks like this, without any customizations and its confusing if you have more than one drives connected to your PC.
The default look of Removable drives like USB pen drives, Memory cards for phones and cameras can be changes using these 3 simple steps.
1. First step is to find a good icon which will represent the removable drive. Make sure that the image has .ico extension.
2. Open Notepad. Type in whatever is given in the image.
Here Label denotes the text which you want to display in My Computer when the drive is connected and Icon represents the icon image name. Save this file as autorun.inf.
3. Copy both files (autorun.inf and Icon file) to your removable drive. You can make both files as hidden, if don’t want to see those files when you are connected to drive
Now unplug the drive and connect it back to USB and now you can see the effect of your customizations.
Have a look at the customizations of my removable drives (iBall USB drive and SE W700i cell phone 1GB drive).
Share & Enjoy
Jul 12th, 2007 at 9:17 pm
A Cool tip. I’ll keep a icon of my blog’s favicon!
Jul 12th, 2007 at 10:11 pm
mmm interesting tip. It works only for removable drives ?? what about individual drive partitions ?
Jul 12th, 2007 at 10:49 pm
Nice tip! Every time I use a USB card reader for SD cards, the icon looks like a bunch of others I have. Now I can change it to something a bit more different! I probably won’t though due to laziness, but I hope I remember. (#):)
Jul 12th, 2007 at 11:42 pm
Very nice! But I like to keep my removable drives with the same icons so I remember that they are, in fact, removable drives.
Nice tip though.
Jul 12th, 2007 at 11:50 pm
This does seem to be a fun thing to do. Now that I have a lot of stock icons with me, I sure will try this out!
Jul 13th, 2007 at 1:07 am
Great tip Nirmal , will surely help me to diffrentiate between my pen drive and cell phone .
Jul 13th, 2007 at 7:37 am
Nice one, turn your drives from boring looking icons, to your favorite icons. this is surely going to give some fun
Jul 13th, 2007 at 9:58 am
@Arpit,
I have not tried with Individual partition drives. May be you can try it tell us the result.
This tip is mainly to differentiate between partition drives and Removable drives.
Jul 13th, 2007 at 2:07 pm
Whenever I see the autorun.inf file, I jump to the conclusion that the stick has a virus and delete the inf file.
So, if you have made this modification - don’t give the stick to me without warning me first
Jul 13th, 2007 at 2:58 pm
Do you have any idea to write about how to kill USB toy virus or how to prevent from attacking ? Because we all still have been attacking by this virus a long time ago and still can’t beat it.
Thanks you.
Jul 13th, 2007 at 4:09 pm
Great way but just a question … is it safe?
Jul 13th, 2007 at 4:43 pm
Nice tip i will update my icons
Jul 13th, 2007 at 5:24 pm
Cool! I will change my icon too! This idea is fresh for me!
Jul 13th, 2007 at 5:30 pm
@Binny,
Even I had this perception that all .inf files are virus.
@Myo Kyaw Htun,
I have never encountered the situation mentioned by you.
@Rishi,
Did you mean to ask if it damages the drive or safety in terms of virus attack?
Jul 13th, 2007 at 7:00 pm
I’ve tried this.. and it’s a pretty sweet tip
Jul 13th, 2007 at 7:25 pm
Nice tip
Jul 13th, 2007 at 7:34 pm
Love the Sony Ericsson icon..
Jul 13th, 2007 at 7:41 pm
@Vikram,
Thanks for the comment.
@Kuanhoong,
Glad that you liked it. I did a lot of search for good SE icons.
Jul 13th, 2007 at 10:21 pm
cool handy tip
Jul 14th, 2007 at 12:21 am
The trick you have mentioned would also work with Cds and Dvds.
[However in case of Cd and DVD it is a good idea not to use long file names with capital letters and special characters].
@ Arpit : Icon Packager ( http://www.stardock.com ) would do the job. After installing it simply right click on the partition you want to change icon for and set the icon from “Properties”.
Jul 14th, 2007 at 12:44 pm
Great….trying it out.
Came through Rishi.
Jul 14th, 2007 at 9:43 pm
@Pallab,
Thanks for the information. Icon Packager is a great software to change icons.
@Techzilo,
Thanks for the visit, hope you liked my blog.
Jul 16th, 2007 at 6:05 pm
Cool, now I’ll probably end up changing it every week (maybe not every week, but quite frequently at least).
Jul 18th, 2007 at 2:35 pm
Quite interesting
Jul 27th, 2007 at 10:17 am
Hmm. This didn’t work for me. Do this trick also works on Windows 2003? I pondered.
Jul 27th, 2007 at 10:26 am
@Chris,
I’m not sure about Windows 2003 as I have not worked on it. I dont have a system to test this also.
Jul 27th, 2007 at 12:59 pm
Heh. It doesn’t. It probably have to do something with the performance/preference settings. However, I tested it with Windows XP and it works just fine. Thanks!
Aug 17th, 2007 at 8:35 pm
Thank you for this tip.
On a related but not connected topic, would you know how to set change the default path of the ‘My Pictures’ short cut in XP.
Default points to ‘My Pictures’ folder in ‘My Documents’. I would like to change it to point to ‘Pictures’ folder on an external NAS drive. (Something like Y:/Pictures)
Anyone else have an idea on this?
Aug 18th, 2007 at 10:39 am
@RJ,
I have not tried out the point mentioned by you, if I get a work around, I’ll surely post it.
Nov 18th, 2007 at 2:39 pm
@RJ
that can be done by tweaking registry, if u are not aware of that, better get some tweaking software, lots of such softwares are available..
Mar 1st, 2008 at 5:45 am
great share, thnx alot!
Apr 30th, 2008 at 4:38 am
I found your tip from a google search…i was looking for how to change the folder icons on removable storage drives. This one is a good start.
Do you know if there’s a way to customize the folders on a flash drive so that the custom icons are changed in any vista machine you plug the flash drive into?
Is there anything i can put in the autrun file that will do it?
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