I have a bunch of removable drives. USB Thumb/Flash drives, external hard drives in 2.5 and 3.5 inch sizes, portable media players, etc… When I’ve got them wired up to the mothership, sometimes the “My Computer” window can be a bit confusing. Hmm… Which one mapped to what drive letter again? You can use Volume Labels to differentiate the devices, but what’s the fun in that?!

I prefer to make custom icons. You’ll notice Drive I below has a Microcenter logo (it’s a private label Microcenter-brand drive).

How’d I do that? Simple… Just click on More for all the details!
It’s a simple matter of two files and a folder to get this going. Here’s a quick screenshot of what’s involved:

You can see we have an autorun folder and an autorun.inf file in the root of the removable drive. The icons are semi-transparent because I hide the files once I’m through making them. The hiding step is optional, and I’ll leave that up to you.

The autorun folder contains your preferred drive icon. You can see the contents of the folder on this drive below:

That’s simply a graphic I made from the Microcenter logo on their home page. You create it at 48 x 48 pixels using your favorite graphics editor. Then take that resulting file and save it in ICO format. I usually use Irfanview for this part of the process, but there are a number of editors that can save or convert to ICO format.

The autorun.inf file is simply a pointer to the ICO file to tell windows where to get the info for the device icon. The contents of mine are listed below:

[AutoRun]
icon=autorun\microcenter.ico

That’s all there is to it. You may need to reboot (for fixed/internal drives), or disconnect/reconnect (for removable drives) in order to get it to show up.

Enjoy!