18 January 2006

Multimedia Card drive icons in Window Explorer

Still jetlagged :( 2AM again. Maybe tomorrow night I'll get round to sleeping finally!

So hands up everyone who's built their own MCE machine - particularly those who have MSDN, for example, and like to "test" :) And... for those MCE machines, keep your hands up if you've bought one of those multi-function media devices which fits into a floppy-drive-sized bay (I can't think of the name) which allow you to plug in SD/CF cards etc. And... Still keep your hands up if the devices show up in explorer as boring drives rather than the image below. Obviously, this isn't specific to MCE machines, so I'm sure lots of you have those reader things in XP machines too :)

Well, if you're in that position, here's how many of the OEM builders change the icons - it's a simple tweak in the registry.
You basically need to change information under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\DriveIcons\<DriveLetter>, replacing <DriveLetter> with E, F, G, H etc.
The subkeys are DefaultIcon and DefaultLabel, both REG_SZ.

The icons for the first three are contained in shell32.dll, but, at least on the Elonex OEM build on one machine I have where the screenshot above was taken from, they've installed an additional icon for the Memory Stick which is why it's a little lame compared to the other three icons. The values for DefaultIcon are in the format "c:\windows\system32\shell32.dll,<number>". Obviously replace c: with your system drive letter, and replace the number with 194 for the SmartMedia, 189 for the CompactFlash/MicroDrive, and 193 for the SD/MultiMediaCard.

Obviously, edit the registry at your peril :)

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# Kieran Jacobsen's Blog said:
29 January 06 at 9:47 PM
# Mark’s (we)Blog » Changing drive icons in Windows Explorer said:

PingBack from http://www.youknowone.co.uk/blog/2006/02/changing-drive-icons-in-windows.htm

23 February 07 at 4:53 AM
# Mark’s (we)Blog » Changing drive icons in Windows Explorer said:

PingBack from http://www.markwilson.co.uk/blog/2006/02/changing-drive-icons-in-windows.htm

16 March 07 at 5:32 AM

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