Yes, it's possible and this tutorial does a good job at explaining how. Their website's SSL certificate just expired and your browser may issue a warning about the site being "unsecure". Don't mind it, just proceed with visiting the page. Let us know how it goes. Of course you can download an icon of your liking from any source because you'll need one for use with that drive.

 

You can do this without tweaking the Windows Registry. Create a text file called autorun.inf located in the drive's root directory, with the text

[autorun]
ICON=drive.ICO

copy the icon you wish to use into the same directory and rename it drive.ico, or insert the name of your icon instead of drive.ico.
when you have saved autorun.inf right-click and select properties and tick the Attibutes: Hidden check box and do the same for the ico file.

My experience is that this does not take immediate effect and a restart is needed.

Dan

 

I don't think a restart is required, at least on Windows 10. I sometimes use Rufus to create bootable flash disks and it also uses that autorun.inf method to set a custom drive icon to the prepared drive, and I've seen it take effect immediately. Perhaps that only applies to removable storage that can be remounted easily. Of course, a reboot is easier to do to remount fixed drives.

 

Update:


Tried the autorun method on my external hdd, no dice, even after a reboot.

 

Update:

Tried the autorun method on my external hdd, no dice, even after a reboot.

That is odd. I don't usually have an icon for my USB backup drive but for the purposes of this screen shot I copied the autorun.inf and drive.ico from my data drive D:.

The data drive is a linked pair of 2Tb drives the P drive is a USB stick and the W: drive is an external USB attached hard drive

 

I will look into trying one of these techniques and let you know. I would probably avoid changing the registry if I can avoid it, but it's not something I am scared of doing.

SMK

 

Well I just tried the "simple" method of creating an autorun.inf file in the root directory of that drive. Instead of the usual drive icon, it now shows a blank piece of paper with the edge folded over sort of what you'd see on a copier or fax to show the correct way to orient the paper.

I've tried several different icons I downloaded as .ico files from iconarchive, so maybe they are not the correct format????

Now I will look into the registry solution.

SMK

 

I was being dumb. I just checked my work and realized that I misspelled the name of the icon when I created the autorun.inf file. Now that I have corrected it, it works!

Thanks.

 

Works on my test vm too.