Friday, August 20, 2010

How do I change Windows drive icons?

In Windows XP (it may still happen in Vista, but I haven't yet observed it), I remember that, for empty memory card slots, the drive icon in My Computer would be washed out. If I would put a card into that drive, the icon would appear in full color. In the system Registry (or in Disk Management or anywhere else), is there a way to set this up? (in regedit, I am looking at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ Windows\CurrentVersion\explorer\DriveIco鈥?) This way, I'll have Icon A appear when there's nothing in the drive, and Icon B appear when I put a card in the drive. Thanks for the help!





NOTE: I am using Windows Vista Home Premium. The Registry key I mentioned early SEEMS to work exactly as it did in Windows XP, but I could be wrong.





ANOTHER NOTE: I am planning to use this on drives that do not neccesarily appear in Disk Management (ex: network memory card drives). If your method absolutely must use Disk Management and/or not work with network drives, then do post it, but otherwise try to avoid this kind of problem.





A third note (of slightly less significance): I used this article from PC Magazine to learn how to set up icons in the registry. It does not address my issue with having two icons for a drive. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,202鈥?/a>How do I change Windows drive icons?
To change the icon displayed within explorer for a drive requires changes to the windows registry.





1. Create (if it does not already exist) the registry key:





HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SOFTWARE\ Microsoft\ Windows\ CurrentVersion\ Explorer\ DriveIcons\ X\ DefaultIcon





where 'X' is the drive letter of the drive for which you wish to change the drive icon.





2. Change the key's default value to hold the fully qualified name of the icon file (e.g. 'c:\myicons\cdrive.ico').





If the file contains more than one icon then follow it with a comma and the zero-based index of the icon (e.g. 'c:\myicons\mylib.dll,2').





3. To see the effect restart Windows - although, depending on the version of windows simply refreshing the window might be sufficient.

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