Use Custom Icons for any drive in Windows

Setting up custom icons for your hard drives, cd, dvd and removable drives can be an excellent way of visualizing the contents of the drives. Windows offers a way to change icons of folders but no obvious way to change the icons of those drives. I would like to point out two possibilities that allow it to change drive icons in Windows.

The first one makes use of a autorun.inf file in the root folder of the drive. This works of course only for hard drives and not for CD or DVD drives because you can’t put files into their root. Autostart for those drives has to be enabled as well because Windows does not process the autorun.inf file in the root of the hard drive if that feature is disabled.

A good software to check if Autorun is enabled is Microsoft Powertoys which can enable Autorun if it is disabled. Create a new textfile, rename it to autorun.inf and add the following content to it:

[autorun]
icon=download.ico

Download.ico is the icon that is placed in the root of that drive as well. You can name it anyway you like as long as both names are the same. This is an excellent method because it is path independent as you can see. This means that you could add an icon to removable drives as well and the icon would show on any computer running Windows that you would connect it to.

The second method is working only on the computer it is applied to. This one works however a 100% of the times which means that you can change the default icon for all drives even CD or DVD drives and the floppy.

Go to the Registry key

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

and create a new key that contains the drive letter of the drive that you want to change the icon for. Create a subkey DefaultIcon and set the value to the full path to the icon for this drive.

It would be really nice if a software would exist that could simply add custom icons to any drive that you select. Do you know of such a software ?