• Normally when you plug in an external hard drive to your Mac's USB port you will see it appear on the desktop (aka mount on the desktop). You can also see it in the Finder in the left column under.
• If you reformat or erase your external hard drive in macOS, the disk icon may change to the generic icon. You can change the icon back to the original image as long as you have an.icns file.

Nicole writes: I just got a new MacBook Air and really like it; however, the Macintosh HD icon is missing from the desktop. How do I set that up?

Personally, the external drive gets the icon set to its purpose. For example: my 3 primary networked drives, and one direct connect external WD MyBook Mac 1TB: hermes: backup: backup umbrella icon WD MyBook Mac 1TB: athena: applications storage: default applications folder icon WD MyBook Essential 2TB: hyperion:itunes media: iTunes icon.

Hi Nicole! Congrats on the new Mac, but yes, I can see how it might be a bit odd that there’s no hard drive icon sitting on your desktop.

Hard Drive Icons For Mac

Now, one way to deal with a missing Macintosh HD icon is to simply select New Finder Window from the Finder’s File menu at the top of the screen; doing so will open a new window that’ll allow you to dig into any volume accessible from your Mac, including your hard drive.

No “Macintosh HD” icon on your Mac desktop? Make sure the “Hard disks” box is checked in the Finder Preferences window.

That said, I totally get why you’d want the missing Macintosh HD icon back on your desktop. Here’s how to do it.

• Click the Finder’s File menu at the top of the screen (just click the bare desktop if you don’t see the word “Finder” next to the Apple menu), then select Finder Preferences and click the General tab.
• You should now see a list of all the items that will show up on your desktop. Go ahead and check the box next to “Hard disks.”

Now, go back and check your desktop. You should see the missing Macintosh HD icon sitting right there, right where it should be.

Hope that helps, Nicole. Still have questions? Let me know!

Bonus tip

Click the Sidebar tab in the Finder Preferences window to pick and choose which items appear in the sidebar of any Finder window. Among the choices: “All My Files,” Applications, your hard drives, and Downloads.

Summary :

This article mainly explains to you the knowledge about hard drive icons in different operating systems (OS), and teach you how to change the drive icon in Windows 10. Read more info on the MiniTool partition software official site.

What Is Hard Drive Icon?

Usually, an icon is a little logo picture that represents hardware or software in a computer, a company on a billboard, a group of people or an organization in society, etc. Or, it can also indicate a special meaning in a language or a system.

Generally, a hard drive icon represents a hard drive in common situations. And, in the computer operating system, a hard drive icon is a mini pic representing a hard drive connected to the current computer. With this small picture, you can see your hard drive on your computer screen and operate it with your mouse.

What Does Hard Drive Icon Look Like?

Hard Drive Icon Macbook Pro

Just as mentioned in the above content, the hard disk icon is a small disk-shaped image.

Hard Drive Icon in Common Situations

There are various kinds of HDD icons in general usage; some are abstract drive images, while some are real & actual disk images; some are of the outer drive case shape while some are of the inner disk architecture; some are simple while the others are complicated…

Hard Drive Icon Windows 10

However, in the computer system, in Windows Explorer, for example, the icons for hard disks or drive partitions are all similar. They are all of the half-abstract and simple style; they only show a drive case of the drives. The difference is the angles of displaying the drives. In the left menu, it’s a narrow side right facing you; while in the right area, it is the half narrow side and half wide side facing you.

And, there is no difference between an internal hard drive icon and an external hard drive icon in the same section (left menu or right area). Yet, the network hard drive icon is different from the local hard drive icon with the former has an extra network cable.

Hard Drive Icon Mac

The hard disk icons in MAC OS are similar to the ones in Windows, of half-abstract style and show drive case shape. The differences are that Mac hard drive icons use more colors and are bigger in the right area. Moreover, MAC disk icons are closer to the real hard disk look than Windows hard drive icons.

Change Drive Icon Windows 10

Hard Drive Icon Mac

How to change drive icon in windows 10? Here, you will be shown with one of the commonly used ways under the help of the Registry Editor.

Step 1. Save your preferred hard drive icon as a “.ico” file on your PC.

Step 2. Search “registry editor” in Windows Taskbar, find and open Registry Editor.

Step 3. In Registry Editor, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerDriveIcons

Step 4. Create a new folder under DriveIcons. Just right-click DriverIcons and choose New > Key. Then, name the folder with the name of the drive whose icon you are going to change.

Mac Os Hard Drive Icons

Step 5. Further, create a DefaultIcon folder under the above drive folder.

Step 6. In the DefaultIcon folder, double-click the default file in the right section and input the address path of the .ico file into the Value data column. Click OK to save the changes.

Step 7. Finally, reopen Windows Explorer and you can see that the hard drive icon of the target disk has been changed to the target one.

You can change all the drive icons (except system drive) at one time in Registry Editor by creating an Expandable String Value file under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerShell Icons and set its value data to the .ico file address.

Also, there are other ways to change hard drive icon like use Drive Icon Changer third-party program, or create an autorun.inf file with the following content:

[autorun]

Macsales Hard Drive Icons

icon='file name.ico'

How To Change Hard Drive Icons Mac

Then, put both the autorun.inf and .ico file in the root directory of the target hard drive.