Win 10 Pro - Drive icons are missing. How can I restore them?

Hi all -

Mouse froze earlier today and when I rebooted, I noticed the following:



Notice my internal D: (HDD) and external G: (HDD)...

There are a bunch of posted solutions, but I just want to make sure I pick the right one that will work.

TIA :)

Hey Brian,

I suppose you could rebuild the icon cache first to see if it may just be a glitch.

Rebuild Icon Cache in Windows 10 | Windows 10 Tutorials

Brink said:

Hey Brian,

I suppose you could rebuild the icon cache first to see if it may just be a glitch.

Rebuild Icon Cache in Windows 10 | Windows 10 Tutorials

Exactly. Tried Option 1 - .BAT file. Ran as Administrator -



Same situation. Access denied?

Now tried Option 2 -

Same "access is denied messages" after executing -

DEL /A /F /Q "%localappdata%\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer\iconcache*"

Now why is that? Again, same situation.

It's normal to get a few "access denied" messages from the command below.

DEL /A /F /Q "%localappdata%\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer\iconcache*"

Does it fix the drive icon issue after restarting the computer?

Hi Shawn. thanks for your reply.

Brink said:

Does it fix the drive icon issue after restarting the computer?

Unfortunately, not. Next step?

So much for that then.

Next, check to see if you may have a autorun.inf file in the root directory of the drives with the missing icon. If you have it, delete it.

Otherwise, I suppose you could add your own custom icon.

Change Drive Icon in Windows 10 | Windows 10 Tutorials

I was never real good with wildcards, but should it be:

DEL /A /F /Q "%localappdata%\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer\iconcache*.db"

Insane...

I had to select Properties on the internal HDD "D" Drive and then click on the Customize tab.
Once done, I was able to select the appropriate icon from here:

C:\WINDOWS\system32\imageres.dll

I then used this program, IconsExtract, to extract the Icon Set from the above .dll:

https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/iconsext.html

Finally, I picked and saved the Icon that I wanted from the set.
And used Customize (for the "D" drive) to find and apply the new .ico file.

Here is the result, except that I created a custom 16x16 Icon for my external "G" USB Drive.
This is a WD Passport in black.



And that's the story.
Thanks for all the help and commentary.

Compumind said:

Insane...

I had to select Properties on the "D" Drive and then click on the Customize tab.
Once done, I was able to select the appropriate icon from here:

C:\WINDOWS\system32\imageres.dll

I then used this program, IconsExtract, to extract the Icon Set from the above .dll:

https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/iconsext.html

Finally, I picked and saved the Icon that I wanted from the set and used Customize to find and apply the new.ico

Here is the result, except that I created a custom 16x16 Icon for my external USB Drive - a WD Passport in black.



And that's the story!

There is an easier way to change the drive icons but it takes a bit of fiddling in the registry (this is easy for me). There are also other ways detailed here:

Change Drive Icon in Windows 10 | Windows 10 Tutorials

This is what mine looks like:

Attachment 194589

EDIT: Oops, I just saw Brink posted the Tutorial also lol.