How to Change the Boot Camp Icon of an NTFS Volume in OS X

OS X users have long known that they can easily change the icons of drives and folders on their Macs, but one area of frustration has historically been the Boot Camp volume. Those who need a native copy of Windows on their Mac still want the drive volume icon to look good on their OS X desktop, especially if all of the icons on the OS X side are custom. But because OS X lacks write support for Microsoft’s NTFS – the file system used by modern versions of Windows – users can’t modify the Boot Camp icon from OS X.

Some old tricks that let users change the Boot Camp icon by manually copying the icon files while booted into Windows no longer seem to work with OS X Mavericks, but there’s still one tried, true, and free way to change your Boot Camp icon. Here’s how.

Enable NTFS Write Support in OS X

As mentioned above, the key issue that prevents OS X users from changing their Boot Camp icon is that the Boot Camp drive is usually formatted via NTFS, and OS X can only read NTFS volumes, and not write to them (thanks to licensing issues between Apple and Microsoft). Because OS X stores volume icon information on the target drive, it can’t modify the Boot Camp icon because it doesn’t have the ability to write, or modify, that drive.
Thankfully, third party utilities exist that can add full NTFS support to OS X. A few include:

Installing one of these utilities will allow OS X to write to the Boot Camp volume in order to change its icon, as well as provide full NTFS read/write support for any other Windows drives you may need to access.
Support for NTFS in OS X can be a key feature for those who work in multi-platform environments, and the utilities that provide it are worth looking into if you frequently need to write to NTFS volumes. In our case, however, we’re just interested in changing our Boot Camp icon, and we actually prefer to limit the interaction between OS X and Windows, so we don’t want to buy or use any of these utilities long term.
The good news is that the two commercial utilities listed above both provide free trials, and they can be installed and uninstalled without too much hassle. In our case, we opted for Paragon NTFS, and downloaded the app’s 10-day free trial. Once downloaded, run the installer and reboot your Mac as directed. Be sure to keep the original disk image file, as it contains the uninstaller that we’ll use later.
Once your Mac reboots following the installation, you’ll notice a new preference pane in System Preferences. You’ll also notice that, even though nothing appears to have changed, you can now write files to NTFS volumes.

Manually Change Boot Camp Icon with Get Info Window

With this new capability added to your Mac, all you need to do now is change the Boot Camp icon using the manual method: find your desired custom icon and copy it to your clipboard; right-click on your Boot Camp icon and choose Get Info; select the small drive icon on the upper-left side of the Get Info window and press Command-V to paste your custom icon.

Once you’re satisfied with your new Boot Camp icon, feel free to uninstall your third party NTFS utility if you don’t want the ability to modify NTFS volumes in the future. Any changes you make to the NTFS volume, including changes to your Boot Camp icon, will remain intact after you uninstall the NTFS utility, and you can always repeat the steps above again if you want to make further changes.
Note that while the manual method of changing OS X icons is the easiest when dealing with just one or two icons, those looking to change the look of their entire OS X installation may want to consider icon managers such as CandyBar (although you’ll need to hack it a bit to work with Mavericks).
The custom icons displayed in screenshots are part of the HardDisk Multiset by Hezral.