Creating Indepedant Folder Icons

Hello. I recently purchased an external hard drive over the holiday season.
I'm loving it. I've backed up all my crucial data. I've customized it with everything I could want on it. Now I've customized it with a bunch of customized icons, to give it my own personal look. However, I find myself in a bit of a bind.

Because the drive is external, it can be reallocated to a different drive letter, each time I use a different computer. So the icons files will only display if the drive letter is the right one (K:\ on my computer... not very common)
(The only icon that consistently shows, is the external hard drive icon, which I set with the autorun.inf script. It displays because it's not associated with a drive letter... which is what I need to do on the other folders as well...)

However, I did find a trial program that could recreate the folder icon INSIDE the directory of the folder on the drive, and give it a desktop.ini setup file to have it run on a foreign computer, regardless of the drive letter.

I unfortunately don't know how to manually create an independent folder icon that doesn't rely on the drive letter to allocate an icon to the folder.

If anyone knows of a manual method, or of some freeware software that CAN MAKE INDEPENDANT FOLDER ICONS, then I'm all ears.

 

Create an Icon folder on the external drive then paste your favorite icons in it. You would then right click on the files/folders on the external drive to change the icon. Browse to the Icon folder you created and select the icon you want. No matter what PC you connect the external drive to the icons will stay as you set them.

 

Actually, one of the first things I did, was to have all of my icons on the actual drive before assigning icons to them. After I had my own folder for icons, I did a right-click on the folder > Properties > Customize > Change Icon > Browse > The Icon File Located on the Disk.

Then I'll take my drive to another computer I own, I'll open it up, and none of the icons display.

I noticed that while assigning the icon under browse, it associated the icon under the specific letter of the drive.
This of course changes, per computer.

 

Set up the external HDD as X: or other letter that is unused on most PCs in the Disk Management Console, diskmgmt.msc, then reset the icons. When you use the external drive on another PC just go to Start > Run and type diskmgmt.msc and change to the letter you assigned to the drive.

 

Yep. That does the trick.
I'm wondering, though, if there are any methods of associating a folder with an icon, that doesn't factor off of the actual location of the icon, but loads from the icon file stored on the drive, without having to change the drive letter to the appropriate one every time.

The limited trial program created the icon file as $blankblankityblank.ico and a desktop.ini file referring to the .ico inside the desired folder, but I can't figure out how to manually perform this same operation.

The method you've detailed does alleviate this problem, but I'd like to truly be independent, in the sense that I can just plug the device into any windows comp, and have it load the icons.