Yup, my Boot Camp drive icon is customized, too!

In my last post, I discussed the simple but confusing steps required to add custom icons to Mac OS X drives. I mentioned that there were some tricks to getting custom icons on some drives, however, including Boot Camp and NTFS disks. This week, I’ll show how to customize these as well.

There are two core problems with customizing drive icons for certain volumes:

1. OS X can’t directly write to anything but HFS+ and FAT, and this includes writing icons
2. OS X needs a special resource on the drive to indicate that the custom icon should be used, and only HFS+ supports this

But it’s easy enough to get around these limitations. Apple takes care of number 2, and we can cover number 1 in one of two ways.

This post is part of my series focused on Apple OS X tips and tricks.

• Access NTFS Volumes On Your Mac
• Clean Up Your Mac! Essential OS X Tidiness Tools and Techniques
• How To Move OS X Time Machine Backups To A New Disk
• Hallelujah! OS X Can Reduce PDF File Size!
• Custom Drive Icons in Mac OS X
• OS X Custom Drive Icons 2: Boot Camp and NTFS

Techie Bits

Booooooring generic USB drive icon in OS X

Old versions of Mac OS stored lots of data (aka “resources”) in the resource fork of a file, including icon graphics. However, this became a problem with the advent of networking and cross-platform computing, since no other popular personal computing platform supported two-fork files. OS X moves most resources into the data fork – although resource forks still exist, they are rarely used.

However, it appears to me that although the “icns” data for a drive icon is stored in the data fork of the .VolumeIcon.icns file, Apple still uses a pointer in the resource fork of the root directory of the drive to tell OS X to use that icon. In other words, when a drive is mounted, OS X seems to look in the resource fork of “.” for a flag that says “use the icon in .VolumeIcon.icns” before it will use the icon. I’m not sure this is the case, but I do know that .VolumeIcon.icns has no resource fork (even on HFS+), but it requires a special resource file on other filesystems.

Since only HFS and HFS+ support resource forks, this is a problem. Apple gets around this by saving resource fork data in files with “._” prepended to their name. So the resource fork of “index.html” would be “._index.html” on a FAT drive. Every FAT drive I’ve added a custom icon to includes a file called “._.”, which sounds like the root directory’s resource to me, and this is required for the icon to work.

Getting It Done

Aah, that's a much better icon for my Maxtor 3200!

So you need two files on a non-HFS+ drive to get the custom icon to work:
 

1. .VolumeIcon.icns – the same exact file as on an HFS+ volume, containing the icon data in the data fork
2. ._. – a special file (resource fork, perhaps?) which seems to tell OS X to use the icon

As illustrated previously, adding a custom icon to a FAT drive is exactly the same as on an HFS+ drive – create the icon resource and copy and paste it in the drive’s Info inspector. If we move these two files over to any other OS X-readable drive (including NTFS-formatted Boot Camp partitions), it will use the icon!

OS X can’t write to NTFS, so there are two ways to get these files onto an NTFS drive:

1. Make OS X write to NTFS by installing NTFS-3G
2. Copy the two files over in an OS like XP or Vista that can write to NTFS

[ad#vmware]The first method is simple, but not one I wanted to try. NTFS-3G is great – it’s a reverse-engineered open-source read/write driver for NTFS, and works on lots of platforms. But NTFS is finicky, and I’m not too keen on risking the integrity of the drive with an unsupported driver. If you want to use this method, though, customizing the icons is as simple as it is with FAT, once the driver is installed.

I used method 2 – relying on VMware Fusion to allow me to write the icon data to my NTFS drives and using a FAT-formatted flash drive as an intermediary between OS X and Vista. I created my icons, applied them to my flash drive, then booted up Vista in Fusion and copied the two files over in a DOS window. They’re hidden by default, but that shouldn’t slow you down.

Note that this only affects the icons in OS X – it will not allow you to customize the boot icons.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | OS X Custom Drive Icons 2: Boot Camp and NTFS
This post was categorized as Apple, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

This makes it much easier to see which drive is which!

I previously wrote about the benefits of custom drive icons, which can help you to keep your removable and internal drives straight, and how to create them on Windows Vista. Well, Mac OS X surprised me by using the same generic icon for every drive, so I set about figuring out how to customize them here, too.

It turns out it’s not only simple to do, but illustrates an odd way in which Apple implemented their split resource/data fork filesystem idea in a GUI. This exercise taught me a lot – what an ICNS file is, how Apple stores drive icons, what a droplet is, and how to use GIMP on a Mac.

This is part 1 – where I’ll go over the basics. Part 2 covers custom Boot Camp drive icons and other troubles.

This post is part of my series focused on Apple OS X tips and tricks.

• Access NTFS Volumes On Your Mac
• Clean Up Your Mac! Essential OS X Tidiness Tools and Techniques
• How To Move OS X Time Machine Backups To A New Disk
• Hallelujah! OS X Can Reduce PDF File Size!
• Custom Drive Icons in Mac OS X
• OS X Custom Drive Icons 2: Boot Camp and NTFS

OS X is pretty clever and consistent in how it handles drive icons. It simply looks in the data fork of the .VolumeIcon.icns file in the root of the drive for an icon resource of type icns, and uses that icon. If it can’t find such a file, it uses one of default icons, designed to suggest either an internal or external (USB or FireWire) drive.

The default icon for an internal disk drive in OS X is not exactly friendly

As a new Mac user, I was surprised at the unfriendly look of the default icons. While external drives get a decidedly iPod-generic white shell, internal disks look like, well, bare disk drives. Which is something most Mac users will never see, since most Macs are locked down tight. I expected a Finder-esque smiley face or an image of the machine itself.

Creating an Icon

So let’s create an icon! For my example, I’m assigning a custom icon to a PQI Intelligent Stick mini USB flash drive. If you already have the icon image, you can skip ahead. Otherwise, read on to learn how to create a drive icon.

1. Locate a good picture of the drive. I went to PQI’s web site and downloaded their publicity image.
2. Now we’re going to clean up the image. I used Wilber Loves Apple’s version of GIMP (the best GIMP I could find)
3. In GIMP, I added an alpha channel (for transparency), and then used the magic wand (with feathered hair edges) to kill the white background.


I added an alpha channel and removed the background in GIMP

4. I then saved it to the desktop as a PNG file.
5. Next, I converted the PNG into an icns using img2icns


img2icns converts PNG files to icns format

6. Finally, to make sure it was the right resource type, I converted the icns file to use itself as its icon using IconDroplet


IconDroplet simply makes an icns into a icon of itself

7. Now I had a perfectly-formed icns resource, ready for use!

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Assigning the Drive Icon

Now we can assign the drive icon to the drive. Note that the drive has to be writable for this to work, which generally means it has to be HFS+ or FAT. I’ll cover adding icons to NTFS and Boot Camp drives later.

1. Right click on your drive and select “Get Info”
2. Leave that inspector up and right-click the icon file from IconDroplet and select “Get Info”


We will copy and paste the icns resource using these inspectors

3. Now we will just move the icns resource from one to the other. Select the desired icon in the upper left corner (not the Preview down below) so it has the blue fuzzies around it and use command-c to copy it.
4. Now select the one you wish to replace in the other inspector (check for the fuzzies again) and use command-v to paste.


Now the drive has the new icon assigned

5. If all went well, you should now have a custom drive icon installed!

So there you have it. You should be able to use this method to assign custom drive icons all day long, as long as the media is writable. I was amused at how Apple uses the inspector windows to assign icons – where Windows would have some buttons to click, OS X is drag and drop. It may be intuitive, but it’s certainly not obvious – even Apple has to have a document describing the process!

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© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | Custom Drive Icons in Mac OS X
This post was categorized as Apple, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

If you’re like most people, you have accumulated a large number of removable USB storage devices over the years, from flash-based thumb drives to external hard disks.  I have seven of these things sitting on my desk or in by laptop bag right now!  But Windows XP and Vista uses the same icon for all of them, adding a few seconds of examination every time I try to select one.  Icon confusion can cause problems too, like the time I accidentally saved a presentation to my big desktop backup drive instead of the thumb drive I headed out of the office with!

Before: Everything looks like a generic external book type thing.

But I’ve stumbled on a great method to create easy to locate the right drive using free software and the power of Google.  I create a custom drive icon that looks like the physical drive in Windows, so I can see which is which at a glance.  Here’s how!

After: Aah, now I can see which removable drive is which.  Shame about that iPhone icon, though…

1. Install a copy of Icon Sushi, a small, free icon editing application.
2. Locate a nice image of your drive and save it to your Pictures folder.  I use Google’s image search function and key in the brand name for the drive in question.  I’ve usually been able to locate a good white-background oblique shot in no time – the manufacturer or a reseller like Amazon.com or Buy.com often has just the right picture.
3. Convert the picture to a PNG file using the built-in Microsoft Paint program.  Open it in mspaint and immediately select “File”, “Save As…”, drop down the list and select “PNG (*.png)” as the type, and click “OK”.



4. Fire up Icon Sushi and open your new PNG file.  The menus are kind of confusing, but follow along here and you’ll be fine.



5. Make sure the first line on the left (under “Icon”) is selected.  Under “Edit”, select “Edit transparency mask”.
6. In the “Edit transparency mask” window, select the color dropper (third from left) and click the background of the image. This will select most of the background (as seen below) and might even be enough for your image.



7. If your picture is like my example, there are still lots of off-color areas in the transparency mask.  You can get rid of many of these easily by selecting “Use color picker continuously” and clicking on each area in turn.  Use the crayon (far left icon) to select individual pixels if you need to.
8. Once the background is cleaned up to your satisfaction, click “OK” to return to the main window.



9. Now we will save the icon to the target drive.  Under “File”, select “Save as Single Icon(s)…”  Locate your removable drive (it is connected, right?) under Computer and save the file with a descriptive name.  I like to use the model name, so in my example, I saved it as “H:\Coolmax CD-311.ico”.
10. Now we tell Windows to use this icon for this drive.  Fire up Notepad and enter the following text, substituting your own drive icon name for mine:

[autorun]
icon = .\Coolmax CD-311.ico

11. Save this as “autorun.inf” in the root directory of the removable drive.  In my example, this would be “H:\autorun.inf”.  If there’s already an autorun.inf on the drive, take a look at it and see if you can add the “icon” line to it.
12. Now eject the drive and re-insert it.  You should see your new icon in “My Computer” – much better, don’t you think?

I’ve had great luck using this with thumb drives, memory cards, and removable hard disks.  But it doesn’t work with iPods, digital cameras, and other such things that show up with bogus icons.  I’d love a suggestion if you know how to modify these!

Also, note that the icon goes with the drive.  If you’re a psycho like me that swaps bare disk drives in and out of an enclosure, you might want to use an icon that identifies the drive.  I’ve added a big numeral for the capacity on top of the enclosure image for my bare drives.

Finally, don’t buy that Coolmax CD-311 USB/FireWire/e-SATA enclosure I used in my example.  The FireWire is flaky.  It’s going back to Fry’s!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | Custom Icons Keep Removable Drives Straight
This post was categorized as Personal, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.