I have a Sony USB media reader connected to my XP PC. When I had to reload my XP PC after a hard drive crash, I couldn’t find the CD that came with the media reader which installed icons and names for the 4 drives which made it easier to identify them (instead of each being named “removable drive”). This has bugged me for a while and last night I finally decided to do something about it.
After searching for a while, I finally located the software for download on Sony’s Storage Support website. I downloaded and installed it, but nothing changed. I found the program and icons in C:\Program Files\Sony Icon. The I noticed the icon files weren’t displaying their icons, but some Nero viewer icon.
So next I went crazy trying to fix my icons. After futzing with the file types in explorer and the registry, I did some searching and stumbled across a great post by KDivad Leahcim on Annoyances.org (it’s the 6th post from the top). I followed the instructions and they worked like a charm.
Unfortunately, my drive icons still were not showing up. So I did more searching and found this site which talked about removable media drive icons in XP. He mentioned a registry key (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\DriveIcons) where you could set icons, but didn’t say how. Luckily I had already renamed one of the drives and it showed up here as its drive letter (D) with a subkey DefaultLabel with a value of what I named it (CF Card). Using a little ingenuity, I created a second key under “D” called DefaultIcon and gave it a value of “C:\Program Files\Sony Icon\sony_r_cf.ico” which is where my Sony icon is located. That did the trick.
One more point of caution – when naming a removable drive, do it when a disk/card is NOT inserted; otherwise, Windows gives the disk/card the name, not the drive.
Even though this was a painfully long process (which kept me up way too late), I am happy to share this information from another lesson learned with my readers.