Auxiliary & Enhance

Drive Icon Changer – Customize any drive’s icon with your own images

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First of all, Drive Icon Changer involves two tiny apps with the same name, i.e.: two different programs use the identical name. Such a case is not uncommon. Fortunately, they work the same way too – customizes the drive icons displayed in My Computer or This PC of Windows Explorer on the fly with your favorite image (in icon format). Therefore, AppNee decided to share both of them together in this single post.

As far as I can see, there are only two ways to modify the icon of a folder of any type. And the working principle of Drive Icon Changer is no other than the following Method I. Although the manual operation is not trivial, the benefits of using a software instead are obvious – you can change and restore the drive icon in a more intuitive, efficient and easier way.

Method I: Create/modify the hidden ‘autorun.inf’ file

  1. Create the following two hidden files on the root directory of whatever drives except the optical drive
    • Autorun.inf
    • Drive.ico
  2. Open and edit autorun.inf as follows:
    • [autorun]
    • ICON=Drive.ico
  3. Done

*** The icon file can be placed anywhere, then you should use the full path like this:

[autorun]
ICON=[full path of your icon file][autorun]
ICON=D:\Icons\driveicon.ico

Method II: Create key values in the registry

  1. Run regedit
  2. Locate “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\DriveIcons”
  3. Right click “DriveIcons” -> New/Key -> name it with your driver letter (such like “D“)
  4. Right click “D” -> New/Key -> name it with “DefaultIcon“
  5. In DefaultIcon’s right pane, double click the “(Default)” value and change its value data to your icon’s full path (along with the icon file extension, and should be surrounded by double quotation marks), like “D:\FavIcons\mydisk.ico”
  6. Done

*** After operation, if it does not take effect, just sign out/log out or restart Windows to make it work.

// System Requirements //

  • Windows Vista+
  • Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5+

// Prompts //

If you want to change the icon of the drive on which Windows Vista and higher, then you will need to run the program as Administrator.

// Download URLs //

License By Version Download Size
Freeware Redmond Pie v1.00 Final 140 KB
NaveTech v1.1 Final 57.0 KB

(Homepage)

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