HDD Letter Icons

This is a collection of 26 harddrive icons, lettered A to Z, to replace the generic icon that Windows uses by default. They are based on Vista's external HDD icon. (I didn't like Vista's internal HDD icon, especially the 16x16 versions.)

While these icons will work in Explorer as well, and feature all sizes right up to the new 256x256 PNG Vista icon format, the main purpose of these icons is for use in Directory Opus drive-button toolbars. These icons allow people to set their Directory Opus drive-buttons to use only icons (which saves space and looks prettier) while still being able to tell which drive is which.

Here's an example of the icons being used. Note the toolbar at the top-right of the first screenshot:

HDD Letter Icons preview


Download

HDD_Letter_Icons_v2.zip (1.8meg)


How to install

You need to create some Registry settings to make Explorer and Directory Opus use the icons.

Editing the registry

Open RegEdit.exe and go to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\explorer\DriveIcons

You may need to create the DriveIcons key if it doesn't exist already.

Below this, create new keys for each drive letter that you want to set an icon for, setting the name of each key to just the letter (e.g. F or G).

Below each letter create a DefaultIcon key and in each of those set the (Default) value to the appropriate icon path.


Photoshop / IconWorkshop template

In case it is useful, the template image is included as well. This is a Photoshop image with a special layout which allows Axialis IconWorkshop to import all of the different icon formats in a single operation. You can use Photoshop's "find and replace text" feature to quickly change the letters in all of the icons.

Template image


History

v2 21/Sep/2008: Improved the look of the 256 and 16 colour versions and changed the font used for the letter Q in all versions.

v1 26/Dec/2007: Initial version