This was first posted in my old, dead blog Jazzed Up! on Mar 13, 2008 9:15 AM

Won’t a background image look great for your Pen Drive? This is a brief tutorial on setting a background image for your USB Drive (Note that this is also applicable to folders). This is for Windows XP (it might work for Vista too, tell me if it does). Let’s begin.

1. If you want to use this trick for a folder (say, C:\Games), then first open command prompt (Run -> cmd). Then type

attrib +s C:\Games

and then do the following.

Create a desktop.ini file in your Pen Drive (folder) and copy the following into it.

[{BE098140-A513-11D0-A3A4-00C04FD706EC}]
IconArea_Image=bg.jpg
IconArea_Text=0×00000000

2. Put your background picture into your drive (folder) and modify IconArea_Image suitably.
For example, if the name of your image is, say, wallpaper.jpg, then you need to replace

IconArea_Image=bg.jpg

by

IconArea_Image=wallpaper.jpg

It’s not necessary that your image should be a JPEG. You can apply this for most of the popular image formats. For example, if you want a gradient.png as your background, then

Replace

IconArea_Image=bg.jpg

with this

IconArea_Image=gradient.png

You can also modify the Icon’s font color by giving the hex code corresponding to the color you want.

To give a white color to the icon text, replace

IconArea_Text=0x00000000

with

IconArea_Text=0x00FFFFFF

You can also use any other color by replacing the last 6 zeroes by the corresponding color codes (refer this for color codes).

3. Change the attributes of desktop.ini and the image to hidden. You can do this by selecting the files (desktop.ini and the image file), Right-click -> Properties, and under the Attributes section, enable Hidden. This is not necessary, but it’ll help you impress your friends more

Refresh your folder to see the result.

Here is my screenshot

UPDATE (3/15/08): Code shortened.
UPDATE (3/16/08): Tip for using this trick for other folders added.
UPDATE (3/20/08): Code shortened even more. Thanks to Mechwarrior5.

Cheers