

Now, disconnect the drive from your computer and plug it back. In the Save dialog, type the file name as "autorun.inf" including quotes to ensure that you are saving it with the correct file extension as autorun.inf and not as. In Notepad, click on the File menu - Save and save the file to the root of your removable drive, that is, if your drive letter is F:, then save it as F:\Autorun.inf.The drive label line is optional, so you can omit it. Substitute the icon file name with the actual icon name's path. Run Notepad, and type or copy-paste the following text into the document:.Insert your removable drive into the computer and copy the icon file to its root, e.g.

To set a custom icon for a removable drive in Windows 10, do the following. Here is how you can change the icon or set a label.įirst, obtain a nice ICO file which will be used for your external storage. However, with AutoRun disabled, it is now a safe feature and can be used for only customizing the appearance of the drive in This PC.Īnother feature of the autorun.inf file is the ability to set a custom label for a drive. It is less popular, because it was often utilized by various malware and viruses along with AutoRun's ability to directly launch an executable without prompting. The icon changing ability of Autorun.inf was kept intact though. However, the AutoRun ability itself was superseded by the more secure AutoPlay. It is a very old feature, first implemented in Windows 9x. Initially, it was developed to start apps from CD drives automatically, for example, to launch the Microsoft Office setup program automatically when you inserted its compact disc into the optical drive. The custom icon of a flash drive can be set with a special file, autorun.inf.

They will appear only in This PC, as implemented in previous Windows versions.

Tip: Windows 10 displays removable drives in the navigation pane of File Explorer, but you can remove them from there. If you created a bootable USB Flash drive with Windows 10, you might have noticed that it has a special "Windows Setup" icon. By default, all removable drives have the same icon when you connect them to your computer.
