HP Pavilion Memory Card Reader Icons in My Computer

[Sid Joyner]

Anyone who has been following my posts by now know that I bought a HP
Pavilion a350n which has 7-in-1 built-in front panel card readers (which I
like a lot). However, I upgraded the operating system on the computer from
XP Home to XP Professional. In so doing, I lost the customized icons and
drive names associated with the card reader drives in My Computer. Now they
are generic "Removable Drive" icons, indistinguishable from one another.

I really liked the HP customized icons for the card reader drives. They
looked good, they distinguished between smart media, compact flash, etc. and
(if I'm not mistaken) even changed colors when there was media in the drive.

Can anyone help me recover these icons and reconfigure them to be associated
with the properties of these drives? I still have a backup (I'm pretty sure)
of the original HP OEM XP Home OS (C:\I386) and some other stuff in a hidden
C:\HP folder.

Thanks for any help.

Sid

 

[Kevin Swan]

I have a Pavilion a220n with the 6-in-1 USB Card Reader. I too lost my
custom icons when I did a firmware upgrade on the reader. After some hacking
I finally got them back. Here's what I found.

There appear to be two locations in the registry where you have to set the
default icons for the drives:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Applications\explorer.exe\Drives
and
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Applications\explorer.exe\Drives

The icons for most of the drives can be found in the SHELL32.DLL. They are
number 189 for the Compact Flash I/II, 193 for the MMC/SD and 194 for the
SmartMedia cards. The Memory Stick Icon is located, at least on my computer,
in the 'udsi.exe' file at location 9. There may be a Memory Stick icon in
the SHELL32.DLL file, but I didn't see one.

Here's the registry key syntax for one of my drives:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Applications\explorer.exe\Drives\H\DefaultIcon =
C:\WINDOWS\System32\shell32.dll,189

Hope this helps.

Kevin

 

[Kevin Swan]

Forget to add, that I don't think they changed when the media is inserted.
Kevin

 

[Sid Joyner]

Thanks, Kevin, for your reply.

Thanks to your information, I have understood and tested how to change the
removable drive icons in the registry. I guess the only thing I wasn't happy
with was the actual icons themselves. Maybe I'm looking at different icons,
but they don't look very representative of the media. I'm sure they are not
the original HP memory card reader drive icons.

Now that I know how to change them, I wish I could get the original HP file
(dll or exe) with those icons. Maybe I'm looking at a different SHELL32.DLL
than you are? (I'm looking at the one that comes with Microsoft Windows XP
Professional retail version.)

Sid