2009-05-01

Advanced MultiBoot - Driver units with Icons

There are things that requires a minimum of effort but becames very user-friendly once completed. It's included the trick that I will explain to you now, that gives the possibility to associates an Icon to every driver units of your computer.

As a special feature that I discovered by chance, I assume that there may also be other ways to do that, but this is anyway a SIMPLE, MANUAL method that requires only a few good icons.

Let's start from the beginning... as minimum requirements you need a disk with some units above (look at the photo).
Anonymous and chaotic real?

Now it's necessary to obtain some icons. Files are called : ".ICO".
I suggest to you this useful freeware program that analyzes your folders finding all the icons you have, without forcing you to search over internet:

Icon Extractor

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/iconsext.html


When you are choosing an Icon, try to have an high quality icon if possible (not all the icon have the same size) because over the years the icons will grow in quality upon the various O.S. , but your mnemonic association between , for exaple, the Backup disk and an icon of a locker, would be useful to be saved.


Ok!
When you have obtained all the icons you will associate to your driver units and partitions, we can proceed to phase tw2: Associate the Icons to the Partitions! :)

All you have to do is to create with a simple notepad.exe the following file, naming it:

Autorun.inf

[autorun]
Icon=IconName.ico

This file has been probably already noticed by you. It can be found inside every videogame CD from many year now. It enable the system to run a predefined program when you insert a CD inside your driver. However, one of his parameters receives the icon name that the CD must assume when you put it inside. About us, we are not interested to automatically launch a program, but we are interested about the associated icon to the driver unit. I've undestood this trick from here.

All you have to do now i to insert inside te Root of every units (the root is the first folder, or better, is the first thing that appears when you double click upon a unit) the created file and the choosen icon. Obviously the IconName.ico must be substitued with the name of the icon you have choosen.

Do the same process for every selected units, and the Reboot your system and that's all folks!



That's all ?
Yea. Just a note.

Under Windows Vista the protection has became a priority, to prevent the users to overwrite important files. Also the Root of your Windows Vista is a protected zone. So, create for first your Autorun.inf file upon a USB disk a near the ICON, then proceed to copy them both inside the Root of the Windows Vista, uning Administrator Privileges.

Moreover you will also undestand that this trick is very important for USB drives because they can be easyly identified one another. It's more important if you have many USB drives with the same phisical colour and dimensions! :)

Good! I hope to has been helpful to you... after all the Donate button is just over there :) ahahaha!!

Hail to the King, baby!!

Lord Hol Napult