Suddenly unable to apply custom icon to system drive?

Don't ask me why and I can't promise that it will work for you but when I have this problem I find that it you select the icon in the get info window and hit delete, then close the window and then do the steps needed to apply a new icon, it seems to work.

I have no idea why this seems to work but it has a couple of times for me with stubborn icons.

Ditto here for what Al said. I've also had occasions where you still don't see your new icon until you restart the Finder. It was out of frustration with this that I resorted to creating my custom drive icons as VolumeIcon.icns files, put a copy at the root level of the drive in question, and then rename with Terminal:

mv /VolumeIcon.icns /.VolumeIcon.icns

That's for the startup drive. Of course, if you change 'em alot you might not want to do that. 😉
Francine


Francine
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I just noticed that one of my partitions was not displaying a custom icon, and DID have the .VolumeIcon.icns file (I had assumed when I had done some major moving things around a few months ago the custom icon had gotten lost in the shuffle, but hadn't investigated since the default drive icon still made it distinctive, as it was the only one using that).

So I decided to investigate, and discovered that the ownership was francine, group admin, while the other volumes all had their .VolumeIcon.icns file as francine, group francine. So I removed the one it had and replaced with another, which then had the same ownership as all the others (francine, group francine). It didn't display. I relaunched the Finder. No change. I QUIT the Finder, then restarted it. Nada. Restarted the computer. No custom icon. I repaired the drive with DiskUtility, no problems found. So I copied the icon I wanted it to have in the usual way, selected the volume in GetInfo and pasted. And it immediately displayed the new custom icon!

Dang if I know what the problem was, or what I did that fixed it. I have three internal drives and 6 partitions between them all, and that was the only one not displaying its custom icon. Guess it is just an example of the perversity of the universe.
Francine


Francine
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I am having exactly the same problem, I have done everything Francine mentioned expect used 'Get Info' to paste the drive icon.

Why is the .VolumeIcon.icns not working?
I have spent three hours testing everything I can think of.

Any other suggestions?

G4 Powerbook 1.67 Mac OS X (10.4.9)

Forgot to add, I have tried this drive on a second Mac and the Drive Icon did not show on it either.

The drive DID have an icon before today and I can still see the .VolumeIcon.icns

This is driving me mad

someone in another thread had success with this method:
"I opened my picture in Preview, selected the picture, and copied it to my clipboard. Then I selected the hard drive icon in info and WHILE HOLDING DOWN THE OPTION KEY, I pasted the picture into the info window. It worked. My hard drive now has a picture on it, instead of the usual generic drive. "

I haven't tried it (I had success just jiggling with the ownership rules), but...

Hi Mike, while I didn't think of it at the time I wrote the above, I now wonder if the Custom icon attribute bit got reset to No, and by using GetInfo and paste changed it back to yes. If you have Developer Tools installed you can test this theory with the GetFileInfo command:

-bash:~francine$ GetFileInfo /Volumes/OXey/
directory: "/Volumes/OXey/"
attributes: avbstClinmed
created: 08/05/2006 20:08:50
modified: 03/08/2007 00:11:16

As I recall, the volume OXey was the one that was having trouble, although now the attribute is set correctly (the upper case C means the item has a custom icon). Recently there have been a rash of cases of drives having the visibility attribute spontaneously changed from v to V, so I guess the custom bit could spontaneously change also. Again, if you have Developer tools installed you can try resetting the bit:

SetFile -a C /Volumes/OXey/

I just went the other way with my drive OXey, turned the bit off, relaunched the Finder and sure enough the custom icon disappeared, even though the .VolumeIcon.icns file was still there. When I turned the bit back on with the above command and relaunched Finder its custom icon reappeared.

If you don't have Developer Tools installed you can download them here:

http://homepage.mac.com/francines/.Public/setgetfile.zip

Unzip and either put the two commands where you want them in you PATH, or just drag each command in turn into the Terminal to use it.
Francine


Francine
Schwieder

Bingo - That did it

GetFileInfo /Volumes/LaCie\ Disk/
directory: "/Volumes/LaCie Disk/"
attributes: avbstclinmed
created: 03/29/2007 15:44:25
modified: 03/29/2007 15:44:57

note small c

running
SetFile -a C /Volumes/LaCie\ Disk/

and relaunching the finder brought back the custom icon.

Many Thanks