External Drive Anomalies

[Meehan Mydog]

Hi,

I have bought my third portable USB external hard drive
but, unlike the previous two which seemed to install themselves
completely automatically, this one seems to have tripped up slightly
somewhere.

The drive works, and I can read and write to it as normal.

The thing is, whereas all my other drives, including my local disk
(C, show up with a proper 'drive' icon, this one appears with the
generic Windows 'unknown program' icon. (The one that looks like a piece
of paper with the top right corner folded over and a window with six
little coloured icons inside it.)

Is there any way in Windows to 'force' the proper icon onto the drive?

The generic icon is showing for the drive in Windows Explorer, and also
in the 'My Computer' window.

http://s267.photobucket.com/albums/ii281/meehan-mydog/?action=view&current=mycompwindow.jpg

When I've tried updating the driver for it, however, the proper drive
icon _does_ appear on all its Properties>Hardware dialogue boxes.

While the icon is just an aesthetic thing, another 'blip', which is more
annoying, is that when I connect my drive, it throws up a 'What do you
want Windows to do?' dialogue box. That is fair enough, but the 'always do
the selected action' check-box is greyed-out. I would like to tell it to
do nothing when I connect it, like my other two, but I don't seem to
have that option with this one. I suspect that the icon fault and this
one are connected somehow.

I'm running Win XP Media Center Edition, Version 2002, Service Pack 3.

Thanks in advance,
Meehan Mydog
Cheshire, UK

 

[John John - MVP]

If there is an Autorun.inf file in the drive's root directory delete it.

John

 

[Meehan Mydog]

If there is an Autorun.inf file in the drive's root directory delete it.

John

John,

Thanks for replying, but no, there is no such file in the root
directory. (And I turned on hidden files as well, just in case.)

 

[John John - MVP]

John,

Thanks for replying, but no, there is no such file in the root
directory. (And I turned on hidden files as well, just in case.)

Maybe take a look at:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\DriveIcons

http://windowsxp.mvps.org/driveicon.htm
Incorrect or generic Windows icon displayed for a Drive in My Computer

John

 

[Meehan Mydog]

Maybe take a look at:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\DriveIcons

http://windowsxp.mvps.org/driveicon.htm
Incorrect or generic Windows icon displayed for a Drive in My Computer

John

Thanks for that. I have just tried to follow the regedit instructions on
the link though, and I do not seem to have the 'DriveIcons' branch under
Explorer in my Registry at all... (?)

In alphabetical order, under Explorer, mine goes from 'DocFolderPaths'
to 'FileAssociation', with nothing in between. I did a registry search
on 'driveicons' and nothing was found.

So I am at a bit of a loss as to where to go next on that.

Regards,
Meehan

 

[Meehan Mydog]

The larger annoyance is caused by drive type auto run feature in Windows
XP that you can turn off. In Windows Vista, the auto run feature can be
turned off from Windows Control Panel but not in Windows XP. The steps
that follow require editing the registry so if you are not comfortable
with it, follow the proper back-up procedure first and read up on
restore procedure too just in case something goes wrong.

· Start up regedit.

· Do a search from the root (computer icon) for
“NoDriveTypeAutoRun”.

· Once a key (REG_DWORD) with such name is found, edit the value
to FF (hexadecimal for 255) that practically turns off auto-run for
everything including CD, DVD, USB flash drive, what-have-you, etc
permanently.

· The keys are spread out through the registry, hit F3 a few
times until all the keys have value FF.

· Restart the computer.

This is one of the first things I do with every new XP installation.

Thanks for that tip, Surya, done it and it is better.

Still can't get it to show the correct icon though...

Cheers,
Meehan