Hard Drives Vista like icons missing in XP

[espero1]

Hello,

I use the PRO version of Hard Disk Sentinel on windows XP.

My problem is, that the Vista/Win7-like hard disk status icons are missing in "My Computer"... (I have only the standard XP icons without the colorbar)

This feature worked several days ago for every hard drive connected on my laptop, but these days I did some cleaning on my system, and unfortunately I lost these icons...

I even uninstalled and re-installed Hard Disk Sentinel, I checked all the boxes in the configuration of hard drive managing, I restarted my system each time, but I still don't have these icons.
It seems to me that Hard Disk Sentinel is working as ususal, but I would like to have these very useful icons as before.

Thank you in advance for any help or idea.

Best regards.

[hdsentinel]

Please check if you have VISTA_STATUS_xxxx.ICD files in the folder of Hard Disk Sentinel, there should be 5 of them:

Vista_Status.icd
Vista_Statusb.icd
Vista_Statusg.icd
Vista_Statusn.icd
Vista_Statusw.icd

While these files are 100% safe (contains only images, the icon files) some older antivirus software may flag them as suspicious.
If this happens, the icons may be missing in Windows Explorer.

If the files are there and you do no see the icons, then Windows icon cache is corrupted and it is required to clear the Windows icon cache.
There are several methods available for this (just search for "clear Windows icon cache").
You may even try this:
- completely close Hard Disk Sentinel by File -> Exit
- click on Start, Run and enter CMD.EXE
- change the directory to where Hard Disk Sentinel installed: CD "\Program Files\Hard Disk Sentinel"
- start Hard Disk Sentinel with the /ICONCACHE parameter: HDSentinel.exe /ICONCACHE

as it does that as well.

[espero1]

Hello,

Thank you for your fast answer.

I tried all the steps that you have indicated for me, but unfortunately I still don’t have the desired Vista-like hard drive icons in “My Computer”...

I have all the 5 Vista_Status_xxx.icd files in Hard Disk Sentinel folder.

I use AVG2014 anti-virus on my laptop, as several days before, when all worked fine and the icons were present.

I followed also the following suggestions given by Microsoft, in order to clear the iconcache:

1) the registry Max Cached Icons exists and its value is 2000 in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer

2) I deleted the IconCache.db file from %userprofile%\Local Settings\Application Data

Then I completely closed Hard disk Sentinel from File -> Exit, I started Hard Disk Sentinel with the HDSentinel.exe /ICONCACHE command in the command window, which has only re-organized my items on the Desktop, but the Vista-like icons are still not became visible in “My Computer”...

Finally, I also uninstalled and re-installed Hard Disk Sentinel on my laptop, and I also rebooted my computer, but I still couldn’t manage to get the icons.

Please tell me if you have any other suggestion to try?

This could be a problem mostly related on the Hard Disk Sentinel software or more reliably on my Windows XP configuration (registry)?

It seems to me, that all the other features are working fine in Hard Disk Sentinel and also in my Windows XP...

Thank you in advance for your patience and for your kind help.

Best regards,

Jim.

[hdsentinel]

So if you select the XP icon set, then everything is working correctly, so the XP style icons displayed as should?

Then (in theory) the other should also work if the files are present, because Hard Disk Sentinel only sets Windows to show the icons - then Windows should display the icons itself.

If XP style icons work, then you may try to simply exchange the files, eg. Status_xxx.icd with Vista_Status_xxx.icd, so then (if XP icons selected) Windows should load the icon images from the Vista_Status_xxx.icd files (which renamed to simple Status_xxx.icd).

Also you may consider trying what happens if a custom icon set is used: http://www.hdsentinel.com/add-on-iconsets.php

> This could be a problem mostly related on the Hard Disk Sentinel software or more reliably on my Windows XP configuration (registry)?

If the XP icon set is working, then I'm sure Hard Disk Sentinel properly configures the settings in the registry. I can confirm that the Vista icon set should also work on XP without problems (even on Win2000, NT4 as well).
If you prefer, I can write the specific registry entries you may check - just to confirm that the setting is *really* configured as should.