Changing the Icon on a Flash Drive

I've followed the directions (found across the internet) about how to change the icon on your flash drive. I go to the "get info" menu on both the flash drive and the icon, copy the image of the icon from the upper left and paste it into the selected flash drive icon in the "get info" menu for the flash drive. I used to only get an .ico or .icns preview icon, but now I get what looks like a random vectored shaped which intersects an .ico/.icns preview icon. I've included a picture below.

I'm not sure anyone else is having this problem (I haven't run into it on any other forums), and I'm only having it with one flash drive. I've successfully changed all of the icons for the folders on my desktop and another flash drive. Any suggestions?

You are doing this wrong. The best way to do this is to open the ICO file in a graphics viewer or editor (Xee will do). Once open, press CMD-C to copy the image, then go to the "Get Info" window of your flash drive; click on the drive's icon to make it active (highllights in blue); then press CMD-V to paste it.

Doing it the way you are normally just pastes the generic file type icon as set by the default application for that file type. Though why yours looks so weird, I cannot account for.

It worked! Awesome. I guess what was tripping me up is that the way I was doing it worked - just not on this particular drive. It was kind of a pain in the butt that I had to download an entire program to do this, but it actually worked, so that's cool. Thanks!

tankedinatutu said:

It worked! Awesome. I guess what was tripping me up is that the way I was doing it worked - just not on this particular drive. It was kind of a pain in the butt that I had to download an entire program to do this, but it actually worked, so that's cool. Thanks!

Click to expand...

No prob. I should also point out that ICO files are the native format for Windows, not OS X. OS X treats it like a single PNG image file. If you can download your icons as ICNS, then OS X will use it "properly". By that... well you can just drag/drop the file into the icon slot in "Get Info" for your flash drive and the icon will change. No need to use a graphics viewer/editor and copy/paste. Also, an ICNS may have that icon embedded in multiple resolutions optimized for your screen resolution and how big or small you have the icon showing on screen. In other words, ICNS will scale better.

My solution to same problem

I had the same problem. All of my folders and icons were working fine until I tried to change the icon for my thumb drive, a SanDisk Ultra 32gb microSD card in a USB card reader. I tried the above solutions to no avail. For some reason, I decided to change the name of the drive. I changed icons to see if that resolved the issue, and it did. However, when I changed icons again, the pixel garbage returned. I renamed the drive a second time and installed the icon I wanted, and it has been stable ever since. It will probably fail now that I have posted about it, but that is another thing to try if the above solutions fail.