Changing an Icon

A few days ago I updated my system to OS X 10.5.2. In this update, they changed the attached storage device icon from the nice little globe icon on a blue disc enclosure to a picture of three stick figures holding hands on the blue disc enclosure. It disgusted me. What is that, promoting the impossible goal of world peace? Togetherness?! God forbid.

Thus began the quest. First up, finding how to change the icon.

I found a helpful tutorial at MacApper on how to do it.

First, find the image you want to make the icon. Then, if it has a background, use Photoshop to remove it, and save it as either a .png or .psd. If you already have a clear-background-ed .png image, you can skip this step. Next is to download a freeware piece of software, Icns2Rsrc (and yes, the use of "2" instead of "to" does bother me).

Next you will need the Apple Software Development Kit, specifically Icon Composer. Take the image (either .png or .psd) and drag it from finder into one of the boxes. Apply it to all of the boxes, then save it as the .icns file. Here's where you use Incs2Rsrc.

Open it, then open the .icns file and save it again as a .rsrc. Once that is completed, find the file, folder, disc, etc. of which you would like to change the icon. Right click, Get Info, and then click on the icon in the upper right-hand corner of the box, so that it is highlighted. Return to Finder, click and copy the .rsrc file that you would like to be the icon, click that icon in the upper left-hand corner, and Cmd-V. Voilà! It should be changed.

In order to find the old attached storage icon, I first went to Google Images. I looked through 42 pages of images without ever finding the correct one. I found many others, in fact I found one marvelous icon that is the default hard drive image, only with an Apple logo. I like it. But I digress. In the end, I had to boot into my second installation of Leopard, on my backup hard drive containing my Boot Camp partition and copy the image from there and bring it back to my current system.

Links!
MacApper Tutorial
Icns2Rsrc
Apple SDK