Ugh. Custom drive icon a problem again.

[ka jowct]

I have an external TB drive on my M1 Mini and a while back I had installed Sonoma on it. I hadn’t done much more than quickly check out the OS before going back to my normal boot drives (one Ventura, one Monterey). I wanted to update the Sonoma drive today and got so much weird behavior with passwords that I just gave up, wiped the drive, and reinstalled Sonoma. Now I’m stuck with the butt ugly orange generic drive icon that Apple provides and cannot change it. Normal method of using Get info and pasting the new drive icon in the appropriate place just does not work.

I cannot think of a single thing I like about the recent Mac OS versions. This crap with custom icons happened once before but I can’t recall how I fixed it, although it may have involved using Disk Utility and pasting the icon onto the Data container icon. Which is ridiculous, and this time that did not work anyway.

THIS SHOULD BE SIMPLE.

[Tiangou]

When you've got a bootable OS on it, the root of the drive is locked so that you can't create the invisible icon file when you try pasting via Get Info.

Go to the /System/Volumes/ folder on the drive and change the icon from there. That should be the icon for the Data volume which is writable.

[ka jowct]

Thanks. I'll give that a try.

[ka jowct]

Aarrgghh. Just futzed with it again, doing as you suggested. The custom icon now shows when I am booted from the Sonoma drive. It does not show when I am booted from either of the others (Ventura and Monterey), and it used to. But regardless of the fact that I am the only freaking user/admin, I don't have "permissions" sufficient to change that one thing.

I really hate these MacOS versions.