How to create custom icons for your CDs or Flash Drives

You know when you buy a game and you put the CD in, it shows an icon related to that game? Have you ever wanted to do something like that to your CDs? It’s actually really easy to do. It just requires a custom autorun.inf file and the icon file (.ico) you want to use. This tutorial will guide you through the steps required to create both.

Icon files are kind of hard to find. You can try looking on DeviantArt for some, but chances are they are .png files. Luckily, it is easy to convert files to .ico using theConvertIcon site. You don’t even need to install anything. Click Get Started and you will be asked to select a file. Make sure to change Files of type: to whatever you need. After that you get a preview and can click Export to move on. You can then check on which sizes to include. I select all the sizes. Finally, click Save As and you can download your .ico file. I will be using the icons from here for the rest of this example.

Now, on to the Autorun file, which are very easy to make. All you need is Notepad or a similar program that can save as a .txt file. Enter [autorun] as the first line, and then ICON=ICON.ICO where you replace ICON.ICO with the name of your icon file. Now you just need to save it as autorun.inf (not autorun.txt) and you’re done!