Drives have no icon association

[Moira]

Hi

I notice that two of my drives have no file association. These are the D and the E drive and they just have that default icon that normally tells you Windows can't open a file. I've tried to read up on how to solve this but none of the tips for changing file icons seem to work, and I'm at a loss how this has occurred anyway because I haven't tried to change the default icon that signifies a hard drive. Any ideas how this has happened and what could I do about it? Change drive letters maybe? I don't really want to do that as it would involve changing a whole lot of other stuff, but the way they look now is annoying!

[morganlefay]

change the drive letters..then change them back to what they were.???

or...a simple reboot may fix this?...its amazing how many thing a arestart can fix..with ALL versions of windows.

Vista I presume?

It appears they left that feature in the OS

MLF

[MadBeaver]

Can you still access the drives?

[Moira]

I'm afraid a simple reboot doesn't fix it not unless the latest of my many tries has worked. This is actually XP not Vista - Vista strangely has a drive with the "setup.exe" icon on one partition instead of the default, but that doesn't bother me. I don't mind what icon the drive chooses to use, I just don't like no file association because I think it looks unattractive.

Honestly this was meant to be a basic XP install while I spent my time mainly in Vista! It's one thing after another - the monitor which is supposed to turn off after 15 minutes doesn't, and I've no idea why!

And yes, re the drives, I can access them OK.

[MadBeaver]

I found two reasons why this may happen
Presence of the file named Autorun.inf in the drive's root folder
Incorrect drive icon setting in the registry

http://windowsxp.mvps.org/driveicon.htm

Hope it helps

[Moira]

Hi, and thanks for those tips Those drives at one time did have autrun.inf files in the root folders, however they've been deleted. I'm currently in Vista here and the registry doesn't have either the DriveIcons key in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE nor does it have Drives key in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT etc. The nearest thing to weird I can find is that in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT there's a string value entitled NoOpenWith which has a blank value. However since this presumably affects all drives I don't fancy fiddling with it. To be honest, I think the problem originates in XP. When I'm next in that partition I'll take a look at the registry there. Thanks!

[Moira]

Oh, wahay brilliant MadBeaver, my drive icons have all come back in XP! I didn't have those registry values there in the XP registry either, but maybe deleting all the autorun.inf files did something and the system just needed a reboot both of Vista and XP. Either way, problem solved Explorer looks so much tidier.

[MadBeaver]

Excellent, glad I could help.