1. Home
  2. Windows Tips
  3. Pin drives to the taskbar on windows 10

How to pin drives to the Taskbar on Windows 10

The taskbar is for pinning apps. You’ll find that if you want to pin anything that isn’t an app e.g. a file or a folder, you will have to look for a workaround. That said, it’s still possible to pin a file to the taskbar. If you’re looking to pin a drive to the taskbar, you will again need a workaround. The good news is that the workaround, in this case, is really simple. Here’s what you need to do.

Pin drives to the taskbar

Open This PC and right-click the drive you want to pin to the taskbar and select Create Shortcut from the context menu. The shortcut will be placed on your desktop.

Go to your desktop and right-click the shortcut for the drive. Select Properties from the context menu. On the Properties window, go to the Shortcut tab. Click inside the Target field and enter the following at the very start and add one space after.

explorer

Click Ok. The icon for the shortcut will change to that of File Explorer and the address in the target field will also change. You can pin the shortcut to the taskbar now but we’re going to change the icon first so that you can tell that it’s for a disk.

Again, right-click the shortcut and select Properties from the context menu. Go to the Shortcut tab, and click Change Icon. You will see an address field where the icons are displayed from. Enter the following address in the field and tap Enter. Look through the icons and pick the drive icon. You can also use your own, custom icon if you like. It’s fairly easy to make one.

C:\Windows\system32\imageres.dll

Click OK. Once the icon has been updated, right-click the shortcut and select Pin to taskbar from the context menu. The shortcut to the drive will be pinned to the taskbar. When you click it, the drive will open in File Explorer. You can do this with local drives, and with network drives.

If you’re looking to pin multiple drives to the taskbar, it’s a good idea to use custom icons. If you go with the default icons that are available on Windows 10, all the pinned drives will look the same. You can reveal which drive a pinned icon will open by hovering the mouse over it but the tooltip takes a little time to appear and it’s counterproductive. You can use either a custom icon or you can remember which drive is which. If you want, you can also separate the pinned drives from other apps by adding dividers to the taskbar.

2 Comments

  1. Doesn’t work. At the end of the process there is no option in the context menu to pin to the taskbar. Only to the start menu.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.