One of the things that I really hate about Windows XP is that it handles external storage like a stone absorbs water.
When you plug in, Windows XP will mount the device with a letter and slap on a generic ‘Removable Disk’ icon. This is fine if you work with only a couple of external devices, but the moment you plug in a ‘6 in 1 Card Reader’ for example, you suddenly have yourself 4 or more ‘Removable Disks’ with the same generic icon. Add to that a USB stick, an iPod and a digital camera and Windows Explorer becomes a confusing and unintuitive mess. In the case of the card readers, you can’t even tell which of the 4 drive letters your card is plugged in to without trial and error.
Ordinarily, readers of this blog would expect me to end here with a bit of a whinge. But to break habit, here’s a nice solution instead.
CD or DVD media inserted into a PC can often have its own special icon. This is done using Windows ‘autorun’ mechanism and it transpires that you can use the same method to give your external drives and devices unique icons of their own.
You need two files in the root of the device: One which must be named autorun.inf and the icon file you’d like displayed.
Autorun is quite powerful and usually used to invoke installation programs. Since this is not so complex, the autorun file for icon changing is actually very simple. Here’s the file I use to set the icon of a SecureDigital card:
[autorun]
icon=sdcard.icoIt should be quite clear that sdcard.ico is the name of the icon file in question
With the text saved as autorun.inf and placed with an icon named sdcard.ico in the root of my SD-Card (in my case this is the R: device), you should be good to go. Remove the card, wait a few seconds for Windows to remove it from My Computer and then insert it again. After a moment you should hopefully see your new icon appear in My Computer.
If you don’t like having the clutter of these extra files on your SD Card you can hide them without impacting the technique. (Right click the file, choose ‘Properties’ and check the ‘Hidden’ box).
I created the icon by nabbing a generic SD-Card image from Google, applying a transparent background and then creating a number of separate PNG images (square images of 128px, 64px, 48px, 32px and 16px). I then use a neat (and free) app called Icon Sushi to merge them into a single .ico resource.
The same technique applies the same to other storage devices like iPods. Place autorun.inf and device.ico in the root, reconnect it and all being well you should have a pretty new icon.
Basically, if it behaves like an external hard disk, you should be able to do it
Although that’s not always true. For example, I tried to set up an icon for my Nikon Coolpix 2200 camera (running in ‘Mass Storage’ mode), but the device is set as read-only, so it’s impossible to create the necessary files.
If you have administrator rights on your system you can also set a friendlier label for the disk drive just by renaming it. For unknown reasons, you can’t change the label of a removable drive in Windows without Administrator rights. Even one that you just plugged in. Probably best responded to with a roll of the eyes, that.
Also if you’re a computer administrator, you can use ‘Disk Management’ to change the drive letters of your external devices. For example, you can assign your iPod to be drive ‘I:’. Look under Start -> All Programs -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management for that.
What I haven’t found (but would love to have) is a way to hide drives which are unmounted. That’s a shame, because my 6-in-1 card reader has ‘drives’ just sitting there that I’ll probably never use and don’t care to see. It’s another piece of Apple-ish elegance we can only hope Microsoft ‘borrow’ in Windows Vista.
I hope that someone out there finds it useful. Hopefully before everyone gives up and just buys a Mac.
Ben is a 24 year old Web Developer from Cambridge and is a computing graduate of the University of Manchester.