14 DAY TRIAL // Since I have started to use computers, long time ago, I met all kinds of computer users, everyone being special in his/her own way. I have been fascinated by the ones who like to have everything meticulously organized on their computers. I always envied them because that is one of the situations I cannot fit in. No matter how much I try, I am not able to keep the data chaos away from my computer.
The users I mentioned above have all the files sorted by categories. Audio files have their own folder, with sub-folders for every artist, movies are sorted as well and more than that, every important folder has a representative icon assigned: a digital camera, a movie role, etc. for easy browsing.
To assign an icon to a folder it's very simple. Just go to the desired folder, right click it and from the Customize menu choose Change Icon.
Well, that is simple, but what if you want to add your favorite icon to a drive/partition? Can that be done in the same way? It can't. There is no option to do that. Though, I have two little nice tricks to do it:
1. Using an autorun file. 2. Editing the registry.
Create and autorun.inf with the icon and drive information
The action is quite simple and easy to be done even for a beginner. Just open the Notepad and write this inside:
[AUTORUN] Icon="(path location)(icon filename)"
Now save the file as autorun.inf and place it in the root of the drive that you want to assign the icon to. For better results, you can give hide attributes to autorun.inf and the icon file.
Therefore, as an example we have something like this:
[AUTORUN] Icon="c:TestSoftpedia.ico"
In order to take effect, you have to reboot the computer.
Edit the registry
The same thing can be done throughout a registry tweak. Go to Start > Run and type regedit to open the Registry Editor.
Once the editor opened, browse the registry for this path:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE>Software>Microsoft>Windows>CurrentVersion>explorer>DriveIcons
In case there is no DriveIcons key, create it yourself. After that, create subkeys for the drives you want to have new icons in. For example: under the DriveIcons key, create a "D" subkey and under it another key named DefaultIcons.
In the right panel, double click the default key to edit the string. In the provided field, add the icons path. I added C:SoftpediaTestSoftpedia.ico.
Just reboot the computer and the new icon will be placed for the drive.