Install this INIT in your extensions folder and restart. If you now insert a floppy, it will have a colourful icon. This change is permanent. If you give the disk to someone who is not running Floppy Facelift, the icon stays coloured.
Advantages over other coloured-floppy-icon utilities:
There are other utilities which do a similar thing, but I think Floppy Facelift is better than the other ones. Here are my reasons for this:
Floppy Facelift permanently changes the floppy, so that it will show up with colours on any Mac (as long as it is running System 7.5 or later).
Floppy Facelift does not take up precious space on the floppy disks it colours.
Floppy Facelift does its work automatically on every floppy inserted.
Floppy Facelift does patch the system, but:
• The patch is small, and takes up less than 256 bytes of memory.
• Although it is not a ‘fat’ patch, it does not affect performance much, since the patch is only executed when a disk is mounted.
Disadvantages of Floppy Facelift I can think of:
Floppy Facelift writes to inserted floppies in order to give it its custom icon (it does change only a single bit, though, not even changing the modification date of the floppy)
Floppy Facelift makes it impossible to change a floppy’s icon, since, when a user tries to change a custom icon, the Finder can not handle a file with the custom icon bit set which does not actually have a custom icon (when displaying a custom icon, however, it is smart enough to look inside the System file if it can not find one on disk.)
Floppy Facelift does not make it easy to change the coloured floppy disk icon from the one inside the System Folder. The easiest way I am aware of is changing the icon inside the System file proper (and no, adding a fake font suitcase containing a replacement coloured icon does not seem to work.)
Floppy Facelift makes it impossible to discriminate DOS floppies and Macintosh floppies, since they get identical icons.
Programmers information:
Floppy Facelift works by tail patching MountVol. If Mounting was succesful, and the volume mounted was a floppy drive, the custom icon bit for the root directory of the floppy is set, but no custom icon is written to the disk. For floppies with the custom icon set, but no custom icon on disk, the Finder uses the coloured floppy disk icon with ID -3998 from the System file.
Acknowledgements:
Bo Lindbergh (d88-bli@xbyse.nada.kth.se) supplied me with the essential information to get this working:
"Just set the kHasCustomIcon bit for the floppy without providing any icon
data. The Finder will then use icon suite -3998 from the System file."
