Strange Question (Revised)

"How do you assign icons to folders? Understand, I'm not talking about drive icons I'm talking about folders in the drive itself while not messing with the file registry or any thing inside the host computer and of course being portable. I was thinking an INF file in the folder but it didn't work."

Above is the original Post. I decided I should leave a clear tutorial after I found out some things about writing ".ini" files that: first, don't appear in this forum discussion below and second, provide some answers to some potential FAQ's; also someone might need this one day and searching throughout the the posts is to say the least-- irritating (especially when a post is long and mostly unrelated). So because you will have to search anyway here's some help.

Step by Step Portable Icons:

STEP 1:Turn your folder into a system folder by going to MS-DOS or better yet Command Prompt and type (sample):

attrib +s X:\folder\folder\

"attrib," or, change attribute-- is the command

"+s" is the syntax, meaning with "attrib" ...change to system file.

"X:\folder\folder", file directory, remember this a sample, when you type this, type in the path to YOUR folder.

STEP 2: Open Notepad or Word Pad and write this in it (Sample):

[.ShellClassInfo] 
ConfirmFileOp=0 
InfoTip=:PRIVATE:
IconFile=..\..\Icons\Private.ico
IconIndex=0

"[.ShellClassInfo]", describes the file.

"ConfirmFileOp=0", you must put zero, tells the computer to not give a system file warning if the file is deleted or moved because to make this work the folder has to be defined as a system file.

"InfoTip=", Creates a custom file description.

"IconFile=", Set to the file path of the icon you are using, mine is called "Private.ico". Don't forget to use "../../" instead of a drive letter to make it portable.

"IconIndex=" this is if you are using a ".dll" file, I don't know how that works so put zero after the equal sign and use one ".ico" file (or read the rest of this post).

STEP 3:Saving your ".ini" this part is more important than in step one in making this work. Choose "Save As". Then in the "File Name" box type "Desktop.ini,"(erase the .*txt) in the "Save As Type" box choose "All Files" and finally, choose "ANSI," or "Unicode" as your encoding and click "Save".

STEP 4: If your icons don't show up immediately after step 3, check the steps to make sure you did it right and check your USB stick or Portable Hard Drive to make sure your files are written and saved correctly. If that doesn't work see the sources I got it from. Otherwise enjoy your Icons.

Sources:

MICROSOFT DEVELOPER NETWORK

"Customizing Folders with Desktop.ini"

COMPUTER HOPE

"Microsoft DOS attrib command"