And It Was All Yellow

Though I adore Cold Play and their song; it's too much of a yellow situation for me in Snow Leopard.


My internal hard disk, the Mini's 60 gb PATA Toshiba, is seen as a removable hard drive. So instead of the normal icon, I get a yellow icon - or icons, as I've partitioned my drive into two.

So as usual, I searched high and low on the net for some clues and got some ideas including editing my IOAHCIFamily.kext but it was all in vain. I decided it was time to just deceive myself and did what was my last resort: change the icons manually.

I booted up with Leopard, yep 10.5 (it's nice to have an external HDD with ol' Leo installed in times like these) and copied the hard drive icon I wanted. Saved the image as MacHDD.icn to preserve the scaling - nice 512 x 512 down to the smallest (how I did that is another story).

Now back to Snow Leopard on my MacBook Mini, I have Developer installed but for those who don't, I've zipped the needed app as well as the MacHDD.icn file we'll be needing for this and it's available for download > here <.

1) Go to the Menubar > Finder > Preferences, General tab and tick the checkbox that says: "Hard disks". By default, Snow Leo doesn't show your hard disks in the Desktop as Leopard does.

2) Unzip the file MacHDD.zip and open the "MacHDD.icn" file with Icon Composer (included in the zip file you just downloaded).

3) In Icon Composer, Cmd+C or Menubar > Edit > Copy as the biggest icon image is highlighted in the app window like so:

4) On the desktop, right click the hard drive > Get Info and once you get to the Inspector window, click once on the hard drive icon so it's highlighted like so:

5) While still in the Inspector window and the icon highlighted, Cmd+V to paste the new icon.

This is only an aesthetic issue but for the OC people like me, this keeps my sanity intact - at least until figure out how to resolve the issue beyond skin deep.