How To Change The Icon Displayed For USB Drives.

It's a known fact, it's much easier to remember or identify things quickly, if they are displayed with colors or images such as icons and pictures. With Computers this is no exception. Take a look at the icons used for displaying hard drives and USB drives.

Unfortunately, those icons all look similar to each other, especially for USB drives.

Well, you can easily change the icon for your USB drives so they stand out from the crowd and make it easier to identify. Here's how…

First you need to find a cool graphic that will be used to display the new icon of your USB drive. The graphic can either be an .ico or .bmp file. (you can download cool icons from http://www.iconarchive.com/).

Once you have the new icon, create a text file on your Desktop (right click and select New \ Text Document) and name it:

NOTE: If the file autorun.inf exists on your USB drive, you do not need to create a new file.

autorun.inf

Next, open the file using notepad and copy the following text to the file (remember, if the file already exists, check to see if the following text is present),

[autorun]
icon=favicon.ico

The file name for the icon parameter should be the name of your .ico or bmp file. For example, my autorun.inf file has the following:

icon=wtn.ico

If you also want to change the name of the USB drive that is displayed, add the following text:

label=NewNameofDrive

Don't forget to change NewNameofDrive to what ever name you want the USB drive to be identified as.

Now copy both files (autorun.inf and .ico or .bmp) to the root of the USB drive. To view the new icons, safely remove the USB drive then plug it back in.

Now you can easily and quickly identify your USB drives…with out needing to remember their names!