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How To Change Windows Drive Icons Manually

Windows default drive icons look cool but seeing them all the time might become boring after a while. What if you could change Windows drive icons to the ones you like? Wouldn’t that be a fascinating thing to do? After all, who doesn’t like the change? And that’s why we’ve come up with this guide, which describes the easiest & manual way to change Windows drive icons and shows screenshots/images for respective steps.

The benefit of changing icons is that – you get to assign your favorite pictures to the individual drives (both internal and external) without installing third-party software or editing registry entries. With that said, let’s begin with the tutorial.

Note: This guide is tested and works with Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 10. It may or may not work with Windows XP.

Change Windows Drive Icons

Step 1 – Firstly, open ‘Folder options’ from My Computer (or Computer if you are using Windows 8 or 10).

Folder Options Navigate

Step 2 – In the View tab, uncheck the “Hide extension for know file types” option and select “Show hidden files, folders, or drives“.

Show Hide Files and Hide extension

Step 3 – Navigate to the drive whose icon you want to change. In the root directory of that drive, create a new text file and rename it to autorun.inf. Note that the file name should NOT look like autorun.inf.txt.

Here, I’ve created autorun.inf in C:\ drive.

autorun file on drive

Step 4 – Download the Drive icon of your choice from Icon Archive or any other icon site. Do not download the .png file. Instead download .ico file.

Windows Drive icon IconArchive

Step 5 – Move the downloaded icon file to the drive where we created autorun.inf file in step 3.

C drive icon and autorun

Step 6 – Now, it’s time to assign the icon to drive. To do so, open autorun.inf and add the following code to it.

[autorun]
icon=xxxx.png

Replace XXXX with the name of the icon file.

Step 7 – This step is unnecessary, but immediately add this line after the above two lines in autorun to observe icon change.inf file.

label=xxxx

Replace XXXX with any label name that you want to assign to the drive. The final code in autorun.inf should look like this –

[autorun]
icon=xxxx.png
label=xxxx

Save autorun.inf file.

autorun save

Step 8 – Finally, rename the drive name to anything, and you’ll immediately observe the drive icon and label change. Now assign icons to other drives using the same procedure.

Change Windows Drive Icons

Optional Step – If you don’t want to see autorun.inf and icon files after opening the drive every time, then you can hide them. For doing so, right-click on the icon file, go to properties and check the ‘Hidden’ option. Do the same for autorun.inf. Also, you may now disable the ‘Hide extension for know file types’ option, which we enabled earlier in Step 2.

AutorunHidden

That’s it! I hope by now, your drive icons have changed to whatever icons you want. If you have any queries, comment below so that we can sort them out. Peace!

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