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I am restoring a LaCie Tsunami 240 external disk for the Macintosh. I found a replacement Quantum LPS240 and the hardware side is well on its way.

This drive displayed a custom icon in System 7 (a small icon looking like the drive itself), instead of the standard "rectangle" drive which is default for most HDs.

The question is, 1) what setting controls drive icons in System 7 and 2) if anyone can share this icon, as mine was lost when the original disk failed.

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  • I found a shot of the icon in my thread detailing drive recovery: twitter.com/0xF2/status/…
    – 0xF2
    Sep 23, 2022 at 15:52
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    If you have a picture of the icon you can just edit a gif with the same image and apply it by copy and paste to the folder. Most of the icons were 32 x 32 pixels. The icon is actually stored in the resource Fork and can be manipulated with ResEdit. ResEdit let you fiddle with application icons as well.
    – Rowan Hawkins
    Oct 22, 2022 at 19:09

2 Answers 2

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LaCie drives were supplied with a software package, called Silverlining. That package would have initialized (created a filesystem on) the hard drive, and would contain any custom icon that you might remember.

Moving icons onto files, or drives, can be accomplished in the 'get info' view (select a disk icon and command-i to bring up disk info), by cut-and-paste.

Some (not all) of the Apple 'Disk Tools' software would initialize (create file systems and partitions) on a raw SCSI hard drive, but early versions of that software would reject non-Apple hard drives, so a custom filesystem initializer was included with third-party disk drives.

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    I think I used Silverlining once upon a time, and recall it had a brilliant dialog. If an operation was in progress and you tried to cancel it, you'd get a dialog with a message suggesting that if the operation was not run to completion it would be need to be redone from the beginning, with choices "OK" and "Cancel". I don't remember which button had which effect, however.
    – supercat
    Sep 23, 2022 at 15:53
  • Are there any copies of Silverlining left on the Internet?
    – 0xF2
    Sep 23, 2022 at 16:13
  • @0xF2 My "Silverlining(R) Starter Kit" folder in an old backup does have Silverlining 5.8.1 (dated 1997); internet-available versions look too new for this use.
    – Whit3rd
    Sep 26, 2022 at 9:45
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    I found two copies of Silverlining online. The older one had a selection of pre-configured LaCie drives, including a Tsunami. It was able to update the drive's driver w/o re-init, and the icon is fixed. Yay!
    – 0xF2
    Sep 28, 2022 at 0:21
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There are two main ways for there to be a non-default drive icon.

  1. The device driver can have a custom icon: I believe these are restricted to being a black and white bitmap
  2. A custom icon that is pasted in in the Finder: These can be up to 8 bit color if I remember correctly

The easiest solution for you would be to use a custom Finder icon and paste it over the default driver icon that you are currently seeing. See Customizing Mac OS at the bottom of the web page.

I did a really quick search and couldn't find any of the original icons. Finding pretty much anything predating OS X now is daunting.

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  • I remember an application which would go through all of your other applications and copy the icon resource out of them. It may have been part of Resedit
    – Rowan Hawkins
    Oct 22, 2022 at 19:07

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