Geek or not, there is a time when you become bored with the standard icon used by your USB memory stick or your external hard disk drive. Each time you plug it into a new computer, the same boring icon and name are displayed? What about changing them to something fun and cool? What about using a Mario inspired name and icon? It is entirely possible and this tutorial will show how it is done.
First - Find a Cool Icon & Name for the Removable Drive
First, you need a cool icon (a file with the extension .ico) and a good name to use for your geeky memory stick. I wanted a memory stick inspired by Mario games and I made my memory stick look like in the screenshot below.
You can find the icon here: Mario Hat icon. NOTE: Some of our readers reported that the IconsPedia website is marked as being infected by some security products. We recommend that you have a good security solution turned on when visiting this website. We have not had problems with this website in the past and we think this issue is rather recent. Hopefully, the webmasters of the website will fix this problem.
Once you have that sorted out, it is time to get to work.
Create an Autorun.inf File on the Root of the Removable Drive
Autorun.inf is a text file used by the AutoRun and AutoPlay components of Windows Operating systems. This file simply describes the AutoRun behavior of the drive on which is found. In order to work, it must be located in the root directory of the drive.
So... we must create a custom autorun.inf file on the root of the drive which we want to customize.
Create a new text file.
Rename it to autorun.inf and confirm you are OK to change its file name extension.
You will notice how the icon of the file changes, once renamed.
Now, copy the icon to the root of the drive or in a special folder on the same drive. Then, it is time to edit the autorun.inf file.
Enter the following lines:
[Autorun]
Icon=icon name
Label=the new name of the drive
If you have placed the icon in a special folder, you can specify the location to the icon, relative to the root of the drive. For example, I placed my icon in a folder named mario. Then, the icon entry looks like this:
Icon=mario\mario.ico
Last but not least, you might want to set the properties of the icon file and autorun.inf so that they are hidden and not displayed when you open the content of the drive.
This way, you make sure they never get accidentally deleted.
Conclusion
I discovered this fun dilemma while browsing the new discussions on the Super Usercommunity. You can find the discussion about this geeky trick here: How do you customize the icon on a USB stick?.
The awesome part about the procedure above is that it works on all types of removable media. You can use the same steps on USB memory sticks, external hard disk driver or even CDs/DVDs or Blu-ray discs you create.
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