Customize Your USB Storage Devices

I know you are tired of cleaning your portable hard drives and USB thumb drives from nasty worms and viruses that attach themselves via the AUTORUN.INF file. Now, here’s one way to combat worms and viruses from infecting your USB storage devices, and at the same time, provide customization to your portable disks.

1. Create your own AUTORUN.INF file. The autorun.inf file executes itself, by default, whenever a disk (CD-ROM, Flash Disk, Portable HDD, etc) is attached to your PC — if you disabled the Auto Play or Auto Run feature from your Operating System, this may be useless for you 😉 You may use Notepad to create your own autorun.inf or for the hardcoders, launch your Command Prompt (for Windows users, go to Start > Run > type CMD and click on OK. At the command prompt, go to the drive letter of your USB device, say Drive E. Once you are there, execute the command EDIT AUTORUN.INF and the Windows Editor will fire up.

2. Type the following commands inside the AUTORUN.INF file:

[autorun]
icon = .\youriconfile

3. Change the “youriconfile” with the filename of the image that you wish to use as the icon for your USB Storage Device (in my case, I used my very own pic — love your own!). If you have an image that you wish to convert as an icon (.ICO) file, you may use the services of http://www.convertico.com — it converts any PNG file to an ICO file online, for free.

4. Save your AUTORUN.INF file and disconnect your USB Storage Device from your PC. Then after sometime, plug it back to your computer and you shall notice that your own icon is the one used for your USB Storage Device.

Now, how does this combat worms and viruses from infecting your USB Storage Device? If you already have an AUTORUN.INF file, you deprive hackers and virus writers the privilege of writing their own AUTORUN.INF file to the root (base) of your USB device.