If you’re anything like me (and if you’re a Mac user, chances are similarities exist!), your computer is just the way you want it. Depending on how finicky you are, your icons are just so, your desktop is carefully chosen and anything that could potentially upset that ranges from a chronic annoyance to wildly enraging.

Recently, I bought a Western Digital MyPassport Studio 500GB. The transition to an external hard drive for some of my assets hasn’t been an easy one. As well as having to get used to things being in different places, I have had problems with the drive being lazy. I don’t know whether this is down to hardware or software, but installing all of Western Digital’s drivers and software seems to have, at least, calmed the problem.

This is all well and good, but one of the pieces of software that comes with my sparkly new drive is Drive Manager. It doesn’t do anything obvious, save tell me that my drive is connected (if it does do something else, please enlighten me!) and put a horrible icon in my menu bar. Well, here’s how to make that icon a little easier on the eye.

The app, for starters, is in /Library/Application Support/WesternDigial/WDDriveManager/WDDriveManagerStatusMenu.app. Not /Applications or /Applications/Utilities. First annoyance! To get to where the icons are stored, ctrl/right click WDDriveManagerStatusMenu.app and “Show Package Contents”. Navigate to Contents/Resources and you’ll see WDLogoBlue1.tiff – this is the icon you want to change.

Annoyingly, I couldn’t get to a stage where I was able to complete this using the Finder, so we’ll need to drop to the Terminal. Firstly, though, create the icon you’re going to be using. The one I used was a 16×16 version of a hard drive icon by David Lanham, but you can use whatever you want. The image needs to be in the tiff file format (Photoshop tries to save this with a .tif extension so you’ll need to add the extra “f” in). Once you’ve got your new icon on your desktop, fire up the Terminal and enter the following:

cd /Library/Application Support/WesternDigial/WDDriveManager/WDDriveManagerStatusMenu.app/Contents/Resources
sudo mv WDLogoBlue1.tiff WDLogoBlue1.bak
sudo mv ~/Desktop/WDLogoBlue1.tiff ./WDLogoBlue1.tiff

If you go back to the Finder, you should now see that your icon is in the directory, and the original WDLogoBlue1.tiff has been backed up to WDLogoBlue1.bak. To use your icon, restart OSX, plug your drive in and you’re good to go. Your fancy new icon will appear in the menubar instead of that horrible WD logo: