Windows 7′s taskbar is quite a versatile tool. It acts as both a task switcher and program launcher. Microsoft even allows you to pin certain items, such as Control Panel or websites to the taskbar. Unfortunately, if you try pinning a drive, like your C: partition or a DVD drive, to the taskbar, it will only appear as an entry under your Windows Explorer list.
But that’s not what you wanted! In this week’s blog post, we’ll show you how to overcome this challenge and easily pin an actual drive to your Windows 7 taskbar.
Tackling This Tip Step by Step
Before you start, make sure that file extensions are visible. To do that, open up Windows Explorer, go to “Organize/Folder” and search “options”. Switch to the “View” tab and uncheck the “Hide extensions for known file types” entry. Hit “OK” and perform the following instructions.
1. Right-click on an empty space on your Windows desktop and go to “New/Text Document”. Name the file “MyDriveLetter.exe”, for example. The name isn’t important; only the file extension is!
2. Hit “Yes” on the window above to confirm the file extension. Next, pin the new file to the taskbar as you usually would—via drag and drop.
3. Here comes the tricky part. Right-click on the item and then right-click on the name of the file again. Select “Properties”.
Go straight to the “Shortcut” tab and enter the drive name of your choice under the “target” section, such as “D:\”. Repeat the same steps for the “Start in” section. Go to “Change icon” if you want to give it a distinct icon—and that’s it! Once you hit “OK”, the new icon in your taskbar will lead you directly to the drive you specified.
Note: If a click on this icon launches a program, such as Windows Media Player or your default DVD playback software, it’s because the default action for a specific drive has been changed. To change this, open up your Start menu and click on “Default programs”. Go to “Change AutoPlay settings”, and make sure that the specific drive is set to “No action” or “Open folder to view files using Windows Explorer”. Hope you enjoyed this quick tip!
