Work Around Hack For Changing Your OS X Hard Drive Icons

This is not a "letis bash Apple" piece, but we do have some commentary that goes with this tip. When Public Beta was first released, it was possible to replace the icons for oneis hard drives just like you can with Classic. However, with the release of version 10.0 on March 24th, including the 10.0.1 update released this weekend, you can no longer change your hard drive icons. Rather, you can change them all you want, but they do not show up in Mac OS X (those changes will show up when booting into Classic). This is annoying, frustrating, and most un-Mac like, so we turned to Bob "Dr. Mac" LeVitus, to see if there were any hacks we hadnit found. Mr. LeVitus has a solution, though it is definitely a work around hack. According to Dr. Mac:

  1. Boot into OS 9.1.
  2. Make aliases of any hard drives you want to appear on the OS X desktop.
  3. Give the alias the icons you want to appear on the OS X desktop.
  4. Boot into OS X.
  5. Open Finder Preferences.
  6. Uncheck the "Show disks on the Desktop" item.
  7. Move the aliases you created in step 2 to the appropriate place on the OS X desktop.

Thatis all there is to it. As far as I can tell, thereis no way to do it in OS X, even if you log in as Root, and even using aliases.

The only downside is that CDs (and other removable disks) donit appear on the desktop when you insert them anymore. But a quick Command-Option-C (Computer) displays them in a window, so itis no great loss.

Thatis what it looks like. Thanks to Dr. Mac for the help! Check out his soon to be released Mac OS X for Dummies too. If you want to download those two excellent drive icons, they have been moved to MacNNis OS X icons section. There are lots of other cool icons there as well.