Restarting File Explorer won’t do the job and neither will the ejecting the external drive and connecting it again. Next, move the icon file to the root of the external hard drive. Save the file with the INF extension and make sure it’s called Autorun. Change the name of the icon file to whatever your own icon file is called.

Open a new Notepad file and enter the following in it. If it isn’t there, you can create it yourself. You should see a file called Autorun.inf. Once you have the icon, open the external drive. You can use a web service like ICO Convert to convert the PNG to an ICO file. It’s best to get a PNG if you can’t find an ICO file off the bat. All you have to do is edit an INF file but you do need to find an icon to use. Change external drive iconĬhanging icons is easy. That said, you can always change the icon for an external drive to whatever you want. This is because the external drives provide their own icon and doesn’t rely on Windows 10 to give you one and these icons sometimes also highlight the manufacturer of the external drive. An external hard drive often has a different icon than the internal drives.

Windows 10 change drive icon