For the last week or so, I've been setting up my new Mac Pro (and as I did so), which will soon be the new macosxhints workhorse (thanks to Macworld for letting me retire my own personal G5). During the setup process, I installed, so that I could run Windows XP on a partition.
Resize Partitions in Mac OS X with Disk Utility. Partition a Hard Drive in Mac OS X. BTW, you must use Boot Camp to create any Windows partition on a Mac. Boot Camp creates a hybrid MBR partition on a GPT scheme drive. Hrtv says: May 30, 2012 at 12:41 pm. You can easily change hard drive names on your Mac. Move the mouse to the icon of a hard drive that you want to change the name of. How to Partition Seagate.
I wanted an easy way to identify the Windows disk while booted in OS X, so I thought I'd stick a custom icon on it, as seen at right. The problem, of course, is that the Windows disk is NTFS formatted, and OS X can't write to NTFS. So you can't paste a custom icon. There is, however, a workaround (assuming you have a USB memory stick available). I found the procedure in on the MacTelChat site; go there if you want the full step-by-step.
Here's the executive summary version. Note that these instructions assume you've already named your Windows XP drive (which you can only do during partitioning or from within Windows. I'll assume the drive is named WINXP. Format your USB memory stick in MS-DOS format (FAT) using Disk Utility.
Give it a simple one-word name - I'll use FATSTICK for this example. Copy and paste the custom icon you'd like to use onto the memory stick's icon.
(The icon above is from the collection.). Open Terminal, and type cd /Volumes. You need to copy a hidden file related to the custom icon you just pasted on the FAT memory stick.
Using my sample names, the copy command would be: cp.FATSTICK.WINXP. This creates the required entry for the Windows XP drive's custom icon. The last step is to get the custom icon itself onto the XP disk. To do that, you must be booted into Windows XP.
So reboot into XP now. Open a window in XP showing the memory stick's files. You'll see one named.VolumeIcon.icns sitting there in the top level of the stick. Copy this file to the root level of the Windows XP disk. That's it; when you reboot into OS X, your Windows partition will have a nice custom icon. According to the tip on MacTelChat, this should make the custom icon visible in the boot loader (as are other custom icons for OS X drives). However, on my machine (and that of one commenter to the original tip), the custom icon does not show in the boot loader - I get the generic aluminum internal disk icon instead.
If anyone can figure out how to fix that issue, please post in the comments. Yep - I'm having the same problem. I format the flash drive to FAT, copy an icon to it using the info copy/paste route (so it looks as I want the windows drive to look on my desktop), open terminal, type cd /Volumes - and don't see any. files at all. Macintosh-2:Volumes rumbers$ cd /Volumes Macintosh-2:Volumes rumbers$ ls-la total 56 drwxrwxrwt@ 6 root admin 204 2 Feb 08:05. Drwxrwxrw-t@ 35 root admin 1258 27 Jan 10.36.
Drwxrwxrwx @ 1 rumbers rumbers 16384 2 Feb 08:09 FATSTICK drwxr-xr-x 3 rumbers admin 102 134 Jan 10.42 MAT'S 1GB lrwxr-xr-x 1 root admin 1 1 Feb 20:04 The MacBook Pro - / drwxr-xr-x 1 rumbers 8192 1 Feb 20:01 Windows And that's it! Tried doing the copy.FATSTICK.Windows, but there's no file there to copy. Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?