For the last week or so, I've been setting up my new Mac Pro (and writing about it 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 Boot Camp, so that I could run Windows XP on a partition.

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 this post 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.

1. 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.
2. Copy and paste the custom icon you'd like to use onto the memory stick's icon. (The icon above is from the Carlito's Drives collection.)
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.