How to Change the Icon and Name of a USB Flash Drive

Before picWindows only:  Flash drives are very popular devices these days, but they don’t have to be typical.  You can change the icon and name associated with your flash drive to both personalize it and make it easy to locate.

Before you change the icon, you will need to find an .ico image you like.  Many free icons are available on the internet – I personally enjoy Iconfactory and deviantART.  If you want to create your own icons, check out ImageToIcon.

Here’s how to change the icon and/or drive name:

  1. Once you have your .ico file, save it directly to the root of your flash drive (not in a folder).
  2. Enable ‘Show hidden files and folders’ by clicking Start -> Control Panel -> Folder Options.  Click on the View tab.
    View tab chunk pic
  3. Select ‘Show hidden files and folders’ and click OK.
    Hidden files pic
  4. Go to My Computer and open your flash drive. There should be a file titled “AUTORUN.INF”.  If this file exists, skip to Step 6.
  5. If there isn’t an Autorun.inf file, you’ll have to create one.  Open Notepad and type:

    [autorun]
    Label=Removable Disk

    Save this file as AUTORUN.INF to the root of the drive (not in a folder).

  6. Right click AUTORUN.INF and select Properties. Uncheck the Read-only box. Click OK.
    read-only box pic
  7. Open the Autorun file and edit the text to look like this:

    [autorun]
    Label=What you want your drive to be named
    Icon=icon.ico

    Substitute your file name for the icon.ico (SNESalt.ico in my case)

    autorun.inf text edit example pic

  8. Save the file and safely eject your flash drive.

Now when you plug your flash drive into your computer (or any computer), it will have the new icon and name.

After pic
Once you’re finished, you may want to go back into the folder options and change the hidden files back to be hidden; some people find them annoying.

Have a great icon you’d like to share?  Tell us about it in the comments.

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Comments

17 responses to “How to Change the Icon and Name of a USB Flash Drive”

  1. josh rules Avatar
    josh rules

    this is awesome. i'm gonna make one look like my dog.

  2. josh rules Avatar
    josh rules

    this is awesome. i'm gonna make one look like my dog.

  3. josh rules Avatar
    josh rules

    iconarchive.com is another good place to get .ico files.

  4. josh rules Avatar
    josh rules

    iconarchive.com is another good place to get .ico files.

  5. josh rules Avatar
    josh rules

    this also works with hard drives, you just need to reboot instead of ejecting and reinserting.

  6. josh rules Avatar
    josh rules

    this also works with hard drives, you just need to reboot instead of ejecting and reinserting.

  7. brandon heat Avatar
    brandon heat

    not good autorun.inf detected as virus in my security disk.

  8. Derrick Avatar
    Derrick

    doesn’t work. Some said to choose “save as” and then encode to ASCII, but I don’t get that as an option, just UTF-8, Unicode, Unicode big endian, ANSI

  9. Alberto Avatar
    Alberto

    I have a question i just can’t soved here; Can you help me..?
    I’ve download all my music to my flash player so I can use it in my Car Deck; the music is divided into several different folders…ie Jazz;Rock;Blues etc..
    How can I name the folders so they will display the category on the Car deeck display;
    Current when I switch folders it just says Folder1, Folder2 etc…

    Thx Al

  10. Mr.J Avatar
    Mr.J

    Thank you!

  11. Emily Avatar
    Emily

    for some reason mine is not working :/ the name does but it comes up with the .png preveiw thinginy for the picture plz help.

  12. Sky Avatar
    Sky

    it doesn’t work. 🙁

  13. Tony Markov Avatar
    Tony Markov

    will this work for all computer it is put into or just the one you did it on?????

  14. Ahmed N. Shahrah Avatar
    Ahmed N. Shahrah

    It worked well, Thank you dear,

  15. Deviant Progression Avatar
    Deviant Progression

    Well . After plugging it on Several computers. It keeps on changing my USB LABEL to normal and also the icon gone. It’s like the autorun has been deleted or something. It has been detected as Virus.

  16. Jose Maria Claramunt Avatar
    Jose Maria Claramunt

    You’re a legend! Thank you for this fix 🙂

  17. Earlwayne Urboda Barro Avatar
    Earlwayne Urboda Barro

    how about changing the folder image inside the drive

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