something STRANGE

By default, when you access the Boot Camp menu, all drive icons look the same. It’s pretty easy to customize the appearance of the Mac OS X drive. All you need to do is “Get Info” on both the Macintosh HD and the new icon you wish to use. First click the icon in the upper-left corner of the new icon info panel (A small outline will appear around it when it’s selected), and press Command-C to copy the icon. Then click the icon in the upper-left corner of the Macintosh HD info panel, and press Command-V to paste the icon you just copied. It’s a little more involved to change the Windows NTFS drive icon, and most of the Google searches provided pre-Leopard instructions on how to do it. If you’re running Mac OS X 10.5, follow these instructions instead …

1. Under Mac OS X, use Disk Utility to format a USB stick as a FAT32 file system.
2. Update the icon of the USB stick with the icon you wish to use on the NTFS drive. You can do this using the same Get Info procedure described for the Macintosh HD above.
3. Boot into Windows XP using Boot Camp or Parallels, if you have it configured to use your Boot Camp partition.
4. In Windows XP, access the USB stick, and copy the following two files from the stick to the C:\ folder. The files may be marked hidden, so make sure you are able to see hidden files first.

   .VolumeIcon.icns ._

5. Boot back into OS X (or shutdown Parallels), and the the NTFS partition should now have the new icon.

I’ve read that the “._” file is actually called “._<r>_file” (where <r> is a Return character). When viewing the file in Windows Explorer, it just appeared as “._” for me, although in a CMD window, it appeared as “._?”.