Fixing the Orange HardDisk Icons

Upon upgrading to OS X 10.6.3, the P55 chipset was supported OutOfTheBox.
But there's a downside...
Apparently due to a Gigabyte BIOS bug, all SATA hard drives appear as External (Orange Icons).

While it's just a cosmetic issue, it affects the familiar feeling of the OS X desktop.

Several methods were developed to overcome this.
I'll briefly describe the options here, and present my own 'Vanilla' Solution.

Option 1: Using the IOAHCIBlockStorageInjector kext

One of the options we skipped in the MultiBeast configuration in Part Three was the IOAHCIBlockStorageInjector.
This kext, makes all SATA drives appear as internal.
I call this a pseudo-kext, as it doesn't load a kext/driver binary, but instead overrides some options/configurations of the OS X original kext.

Although it's not an additional kext, I don't like it, as we lose Hot-Swap support.
It's still possible to unmount and remove drives, but upon reconnecting, those don't get mounted automatically (and it's necessary to use Disk Utility).

Option 2: Using the JMicron36xSATA kext

The JMicron36xSATA is identical to JMicron36xeSATA (which we selected in MultiBeast in Part Three), except that it uses an approach similar to the IOAHCIBlockStorageInjector, thus losing Hot-Swap again.

Option 3: Overwriting the External.icns file

This was used by some users in the tonymacx86 forum. It consists of overwriting the contents of the /System/Library/Extensions/IOStorageFamily.kext/Contents/Resources/External.icns file with the contents of /System/Library/Extensions/IOStorageFamily.kext/Contents/Resources/Internal.icns.
The easiest way to do this is to rename (so it also keeps a backup) the External.icns file, and copy the Internal.icns as External.icns.

The shortcomings of this method are, in my opinion, the "destruction" of the original icon file (albeit it's backed-up), and as a side-effect, all external drives on the SATA controller are shown as internal.

Option 4: Lnx2Mac 'Vanilla' solution... Assigning a custom icon

As the orange icons is just a cosmetic issue, I though it would be best to apply to it, well... "Make-Up"...

So we are going to assign a custom icon to our hard drive icon.

You might not be aware of it, but it's possible to alter the icon assigned to any file in OS X.
This is easily accomplished, by pasting the contents of the clipboard into the icon.

Great ! Let's do it on our hard drive icon!

So, first, we want to grab the original Internal Hard Disk icon into the clipboard.
We'll use Preview.app for this:

• Open Preview.app
• Select File|Open... or hit CmdKeyO
• When the Open dialog appears, hit / (A "Go to the folder:" sub-dialog will appear)
• Continue typing (or Copy/Paste) the following path:
  /System/Library/Extensions/IOStorageFamily.kext/Contents/Resources/
• Click on "Go"
• Select Internal.icns and click "Open"
• If the preview sidebar is not shown, click on its icon
• Select the first image, Internal.icns-1, and select Edit|Copy (or hit CmdKeyC)
• You can now Quit Preview

With the Icon in the clipboard, we can now apply it to our hard disk icon.

• Click on your Hard Drive's icon, on the desktop
• Hit CmdKeyi to get the "Info" dialog
• Select the small icon on the top of this dialog (not the one under Preview). A blue aura will appear
  
  
• Hit CmdKeyV to paste the icon
• Close the Info dialog

If you have multiple drives, you can repeat the Pasting process.


What's missing here ?...

Option 5: The holy grail... A DSDT based solution...

Ideally, we'd like to solve this at the DSDT level.
There were several attempts at it, but short of disguising the P55 as another Chipset, no other endeavor that I know of was successful at this...

Post your ideas, and we might collectively succeed at it !


Until then... Enjoy your familiar desktop !