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A few weeks back, John Howard blogged about changing the Windows Explorer drive icons for his multimedia cards. I decided to give it a go myself and it is pretty cool, although I still can’t find a memory stick icon that I like, so that’s been left at the default setting.

One point to be aware of (that I missed in John’s post) - the DriveIcons and DriveLabel registry items are subkeys (not values) - the actual registry settings that I used are:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\DriveIcons]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\DriveIcons\E]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\DriveIcons\E\DefaultIcon]@="%systemroot%\\system32\\shell32.dll,194"
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\DriveIcons\E\DefaultLabel]@="SmartMedia Card"
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\DriveIcons\F]@=""
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\DriveIcons\F\DefaultIcon]@="%systemroot%\\system32\\shell32.dll,189"
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\DriveIcons\F\DefaultLabel]@="CompactFlash Card/MicroDrive"
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\DriveIcons\G]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\DriveIcons\G\DefaultIcon]@="%systemroot%\\system32\\shell32.dll,193"
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\DriveIcons\G\DefaultLabel]@="Secure Digital Card"
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\DriveIcons\H]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\DriveIcons\H\DefaultIcon]@=""
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\DriveIcons\H\DefaultLabel]@="Memory Stick"

Icons don’t have to be stored within a dynamic link library (DLL) - one MSFN forum post indicates that .ICO files can be used too.

Finally, my USB Flash Drive also has an icon. Because this could have a different drive letter depending on what other devices are connected, I didn’t use the registry approach. Instead, I saved an autorun.inf file in the root folder of the device, with the following contents:

[autorun]
label=USB Flash Drive (128MB)
icon=shell32.dll,12

Using this method the drive lable and icon change whichever computer I use the device in (provided that shell32.dll is available).