Cannot change icon for external HD

bawldiggle · 03 Mar 2013

Have a Western Digital external HD (WD 2500BEV External USB Device).
It is about 3 years old but was only used once.

Recently resurrected the device to carry about 900+ TXT files (AutoCad VBA code snippets)
When using the device between 3 PCs -- if device was hot plugged, the PC froze, not even Ctrl+Alt+Delete would raise "Task Manager".
Radical shut-down with "Startup" btn on PC.
The only way to access the device was from a cold start with the device plugged in.

Copied data + device ICO + INF files to a safe folder
Reformated the external-device as NTFS
Copied all data files back onto the device including the ICO + INF files (original Western Digital ICO + INF files)

Device now runs like a new one except ...
The icon now fails all I get is the default windows icon, instead of the WD icon.
With a lot of drives active I would like a distinctive icon
(Have also rewritten the INF file as a precaution with and without "Link")

Why is the icon not "sticking" ??
I would appreciate any help
Thank you

3 PCs are: Win7 x86, Win7 x64, WinXP x86

jumanji · 04 Mar 2013

How to change the default icon for any external drive:

Find/make and then copy a .ico icon file onto your external hard drive, call it say wdicon.ico.

Open Notepad, type the following and save it as autorun.inf on the external drive.

[autorun]
icon = wdicon.ico
label = WD 1

(You may give any name to the icon and also any label to your ext. HDD but that should reflect in the autorun.inf file correctly)

A typical icon autorun file created by Rufus for its bootable pendrive.