How do I change the drive icons in Catalina?

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Level 1

15 points

How do I change the drive icons in Catalina?

How do I change the drive icons in Catalina? Doing info and selecting the icon and pasteing a new icon does not work in Catalina.

Another broken feature with Catalina because of inadequate Apple development configuration control and requirements management. Continuing evidence of the lack of Software Engineering Management and disciplined development and/or poor software verification/regression testing. Seems like the user interface programmers have no oversight and make changes without consideration for long time loyal users who have invested hundreds of thousands if not millions of man-hours learning and using the Mac OS user interface capabilities and features. Very unprofessional and arrogant.

iMac 27", macOS 10.12

Posted on Apr 28, 2020 11:31 AM

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Answer 1

Barney-15E

Level 10

117,190 points

Apr 28, 2020 12:10 PM in response to macnicol

Probably depends on the drive. Various drives root level (topmost) are protected in Catalina, so that may be what prevents changing the icon.

They would have to either remove the security restrictions or re-design the custom icon methodology. I doubt the use of custom icons would rise to that level of effort.

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Answer 2

macnicol Author

Level 1

15 points

Apr 28, 2020 4:16 PM in response to Barney-15E

Thanks for the response.

With administrator privilege and unlocking the drive in the Get Info window, I can change all drive icons except the APFS formatted drives such as the Macintosh HD and any backup bootable drive of the Macintosh HD. Using Drive Genius' Icon Set tool I can change the drive icons for these drives as well but when I do a Get Info the preview window shows the new icon but the icon shown on the desktop doesn't change from the default ugly icon.

Frustrating since someone did "re-design the custom icon methodology" and caused an unnecessary regression from every MacOS release since MacOS 9! Wonder if this was reviewed and approved during a requirements and change control review process. if so, then it should have been identified as a change in the release documentation. Not the Apple I have known since 1984.

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Answer 3

Ronasara

Level 6

15,115 points

Apr 29, 2020 10:00 AM in response to macnicol

You apparently know how to use the paste method to change an icon's appearance. I have found that it works only on the icon for the Macintosh OS which is currently active. To change the icon for a different operating system's HD requires that you first restart from that drive's OS and then you can do the paste to it. Then when restarting from another drive, the icon will continue to display as you want it to. I hope this is helpful.

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Answer 4

Barney-15E

Level 10

117,190 points

Apr 28, 2020 6:31 PM in response to macnicol

The Macintosh HD is mounted Read Only, so changing the icon will never work unless they redirect to the Macintosh HD - Data volume.

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How do I change the drive icons in Catalina?

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