Catalina Custom Finder Icons Broken?

I just installed Catalina and to celebrate bought a new LaCie 4TB thunderbolt 3 drive for Time Machine. On the desktop it had a very nice bright orange icon to match its physical look. For some reason Time Machine wanted to erase and format and then, worse, during the formatting problem it crashed. I was left with a new hard drive that would not mount. I took it back to Apple store. They used Disk Utility to reformat the disk. Took it home and it worked on Time Machine BUT the beautiful orange icon was gone. I knew that LaCie had .icns files so just let it run. After the backup I went and downloaded an icon file and like a hundred times in the past years went to the drive's Get Info screen and dragged over the .icns file. But this time the drive icon would not change! A quick internet search showed me that apparently Catalina 10.15.1 will not allow for changes to icons? Anyone have a work around or an idea? Right now I could go back to the store and after erasing the backup exchange it for a new hard drive. But that seems somehow obsessive. But I would really like the original icon back!! Does anyone know if Apple somehow considers this a "feature" on a new OS or is this failure to allow customers to customize icons a bug we can expect to see addressed in an update? Thanks!