So does anyone here know how to change is so that when i boot up my macbook pro while holding alt, i get to see 2 different distinct hardrive icons? one for windows and one for xp? if no, does anyone know how to just change them all then? becuase i heard you can only change all the drives, and you cant seperate them.. would be neat

Best bet would be rEFIt. I don't think there is a way to change the default boot loader icons... Unless you are crazy good in tweaking the efi code?



http://refit.sourceforge.net/

i just switched my desktop hardrive with different icons, and it works in the boot loader!

the only problem is, is that the mac hardrive icon i switched works fine, but the windows one shows as a normal hardrive icon( i have always switched it thought).. booting into mac again the 2 harddrives still had there icons, i dont understand why the windows one wont show up in bootloader..

This is a limitation in the built-in boot volume chooser. For legacy booting, it doesn't actually check the individual partitions, but just the disk as a whole. As a result, even if you use FAT32 (which the firmware can read and even write) no custom icon shows up because the firmware doesn't look for one.

In rEFIt, you should be able to see the custom volume icon if you use FAT32 on your Windows partition. But then, it automatically shows a Windows icon anyway (even if you use NTFS) and if you don't like it you can simply replace it. BTW, you can hide most of the extra stuff in the rEFIt menu screen so it looks similar to the built-in one.

If I change the Mac partition, the icon would change, but not Windows. Is there a trick to change Windows partition icon?

As I was trying to say in my previous post, no. It simply isn't possible.

Like Chris said, it's not currently possible to change the icon for the bootloader unless you use a rEFIt as the bootloader...

But you can change the icon on the Desktop within OSX.

If you installed XP on a FAT32 partition it's a pretty simple change... just do it as you would any other device icon. But hopefully you didn't do that.

But if it's a NTFS drive this is what you can do:

1] Format a USB stick to FAT32. Change the Drive icon for it to the one you want your Windows drive to be.
2] In terminal, go to: /Volumes/

There will now be a file there called '._USBSTICKNAME' eg. mine says '._STICKIE'

duplicate that file, but call it '._WINDOWSXPDRIVENAME' eg. mine ways '._WinXP'

3] Boot Into Windows. On the USB stick there will be a file called '.VolumeIcon.icns'.
4] Copy that file to C:\

Done. You can change the USB Stick icon to something else now...

Hi - I've tried doing this using an SD card plugged into a card reader, but when I try to format it, it always formats in FAT16 and not FAT32. Consequently trying the above doesn't work - am I right in my assumptions it's because it's not FAT32 or am I doing something else wrong?

EDIT: Discovered that whilst it doesn't work in displaying the icon in the Finder or on the Desktop, it does show a rather fuzzy version of it when installing a new app and choosing the destination....

Okay… I'm gonna try giving my NTFS drive an icon. Now… Is there a trick to give the drive a name too? Mine's called "Untitled" and I can't change it!

Edit: Never mind! I discovered I could just name the drive in Properties within Vista and it works! I now have the NTFS partition named "Windows" with an icon on my Mac Desktop. Too bad Apple's bootloader doesn't look for the icon.

Hi... a little OT, but on rEFit.

Is it possible to change the Text Labels in rEFit?
I'm okay with the icons... but I'd like to change the "Boot legacy OS from partition 2".

Cheers.

I'm afraid that's not possible right now. I plan to add full configurability to rEFIt one day, but that is a large undertaking and I haven't started yet...

-chrisp

what icons are you talking about? is it the icons that come up if you hold the option button? if so use rEFIt and get the images you want, delete the background of the image, convert to icns ( do a google search for img2icns), rename file, So I wanted to chane the legacy OS from the bootcamp icon to a windows vista one i would change the vista.icns to os_legacy.icns. thats pretty simple. after you change he file name go to the rEFIt folder and navigate to icons, delete the old one and insert the new. Works well with me. I will see if i can get a screen up for you.

UPDATE:

Here is an image.



I will not be winning any genious awards soon. I had to take the picture with my cam. I dotn have photoshop and refuse to use roseta so i could not fix the blurryness