OS X Yosemite :: Spotlight Won't Search External Hard Drive
Dec 3, 2014
I have recently upgraded to Yosemite but when I use Spotlight to search for a file spotlight does not search or include any files on my external hard drive. I have had one community member suggest to explicitly check the Spotlight index via command line. I tried to follow his instructions but my limited skills produced a zero. Unfortunately, he hasn't replied back for further instruction. Â
Info:
iMac, OS X Yosemite (10.10.1)
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Dec 11, 2014
I upgraded about a month ago from 10.6. I have since discovered that Spotlight will show up search results using a Western Digital external drive but no results when I use my Seagate Back Up Plus external drive, which is the main drive I use. How to get Spotlight to get to search the Seagate drive?Â
Info:
iMac, OS X Yosemite (10.10.1), 21.5" Mid July 2011
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Dec 4, 2014
After installing Yosemite on my iMac, Spotlight search results are minimal if at all (only contacts pop up)
I've adjusted Spotlight preferences by unchecking all search areas and rearranging the order of search preferences so documents, files and contacts are the only areas to search and still no luck.
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Jun 15, 2008
One of my important external hard drives recently died and I was wondering of there was a way to see a list of files that were on the drive before it crashed, maybe the spotlight index?
Before sending the drive in for recovery (and not attempting to change the logic board myself) I would like to see if there is any private data on the drive that I wouldn't want to fall into the wrong hands.
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Sep 3, 2014
I have an external harddrive (not Apple) when i plug this into my Macbook Pro it works fine however i cannot search for anything specific on the harddrive.I have tried opening the device in finder where there is a search option but it is not able to find anything.
For instance - i have a number of ebooks on my harddrive and wanted to find a specific book although i know the book is on the harddive the search cannot find it or the author.
This is the same when searching for an individual document.
Info:
MacBook Pro with Retina display
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May 17, 2012
I have an external drive with a lot of music on it. I recently upgraded to Lion and now the spotlight will not search the disc.
There used to me a spotlight box in the corner of the drive window and now there isn't. The disc is half a tare and it's next to impossible to search manually. It is a Go Flex drive.
Info:
iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.8), 20" screen 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
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Jun 21, 2012
New mac user here. Running latest Lion (10.7.4) on a Macbook pro. I have Paragon NTFS installed, and reading/writing to NTFS volumes has worked fine. However, I am having an issue with spotlight on my external hard drive (500 gb, NTFS formatted). It simply does not work. Searching my internal main hd works fine.Â
I have tried several suggested solutions to this problem already. This includes adding and removing the hard drive from the privacy tab of spotlight. I also tried several terminal commands that I found online such as "sudo mdutil -E" and "sudo mdutil -i on". These all indicate that indexing on my external drive is in fact on. Spotlight does not seem to be indexing the drive. HOWEVER it does return results for folders that I have opened. Seems kind of strange. Doesn't help me much, as I am not about to open 1000's of folders and files just so they can be found through spotlight.Â
Info:
MacBook
Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.4)
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Oct 13, 2009
A while back I switched a external drive from being plugged directly into the USB port of my mac to being plugged into the USB port of a Time Capsule, now accessed via wireless network. When the disk was plugged directly to computer Spotlight would find files with the search string contained within the body of the document. Now it doesn't do this (it will only find file names). Is this standard behavior of disks connected to a Time Capsule or am I missing something?
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Dec 12, 2014
Just bought a Retina Imac with Yosemite and now the WD My Passport external hard drive won't work with it anymore.Â
At first it started to copy files, very slowly though, and then would just get stuck despite updating the firmware on the drive.Â
It works fine on my Mac Book Pro running Mavericks so it must have something to do with Yosemite ....
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Dec 7, 2014
How do I safely "eject" my 2 TB Seagate external hard drive after backing my Mac Air onto it? I need to update my operating software, never had since I first got it. So I bought the Seagate HD, plugged it in and Time Machine just started running. Now I'd really like to be able to confirm that my entire machine backed up completely, and I think it is best to unplug the hard drive before upgrading the OS...is that right?
Info:
MacBook Air, Mac OS X (10.6.8)
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Dec 2, 2014
Computer: Mac Mini, 2009 or so, 160 GB HD (about 50 available), Yosemite.
Issue: Set up a separate user and trying to import information from a Mac Book that is having issues. Mac Book was backed up to an external HD via Time Machine
Question: Is it possible to use time machine to transfer some of the information (photos, music, files) from the external hard drive to the Mac Mini? Is it possible to extract the information from the hard drive by connecting it to the Mac Mini without using Time Machine?
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May 24, 2012
I've got 3 large external hard-drives--WD, Seagate, iOmega--connected to my iMac to contain a sprawling music collection. I'm working on deduping, etc., but each attempt to search a single hard drive results in my search being shunted to "All My Files." I'll watch the Finder each time I enter a search term in the window of one drive, and upon entering a syllable in a drive's Search box, the area is expanded to include every folder in at least 4 different hard drives (inclding my iMac's).
I'm not sure if the problem is overly large drives (500 GB to 1.5 TB) or some default setting, probably associated with Spotlight, that interprets each and every search as, basically, "everything Spotlight can conceivably see." Needless to say, my cleaning project is going slow--primarily because I can't work "one room at a time."
Info:iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.2), 2.5 GHz Intel Core i5s).
I
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Jan 12, 2009
I noticed the other day that mds was taking up all my cpu power, and spotlight was trying to index my drive, with 876489 hours remaining. Did a bit of googling and found and got a terminal command to reset the whole of spotlight, left it over night next morning it was stuck at 90%. I then tried the application spotless to reset spotlight...left it over night now stuck on 89% with 157859 hours remaining. IMac G5 2.1Gz, 350GB of a 500GB drive used.
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Jun 23, 2009
right, i have a HFS formatted 500gb external drive which i use everyday, but today spotlight just keeps indexing it, it has a lot of media on it which i access daily so spotlight is needed to search it.
i mean its been indexing for a good 2 hours.
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Mar 5, 2012
Everytime I do a 'find' I see my external drive in the list, but when I type in what I'm looking for it only searches my internal drive and it's making me nuts. i tried Mac help and the responses were things like having time announced if a screen looks blurry specifying a keyboard type about motion about quartz extreme
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Apr 2, 2009
I upgraded my harddrive this weekend. Here is how I did it:
1.) replaced the hard drive in my laptop
2.) Loaded Leopard onto the new hard drive
3.) Connected my old drive in an enclosure as an external drive
4.) Used the migration assistant to migrate my profile and files from the old drive.
Everything is good, but spotlight doesn't work well. It misses tons of stuff that IS there. I think the drive needs to be re-indexed?
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May 17, 2012
It's actually one of five partions on the external drive, and the only one with a problem. Two of the other four are nicely on the Privacy List, and the other two are both indexed and kept nicely up to date. But the Fifth cannot be indexed, although it once was partially. I have run Spotless, which lists all other drives just as I expect but for this one it reports: "The Metadata Server is reporting that content indexing is DISABLED for the volume Fifth but the volume itself is reporting that the content indexing status is set to ENABLED." It is possible to find an 8Kb index on the volume, then Trash and delete it; Spotlight immediately re-creates another index-in-waiting but does not actually do the indexing or add anything in the folder. An added frustration is that the 'folder' is both invisible, locked and seems to be without 'ownership' or other conventional attributes.
1) I have done the primitive Add to Privacy and Remove Dance nothing has changed.
2) I have used Terminal, deleted all .Spotlight-V100 indexes, disabled Spotlight rebooted, renabled it and rebooted—nothing has changed. This included carefully following steps in other posters' accounts (some failed, some succeeded) and a site that gave a particularly thorough version.
3) I have used Spotless although it offers to do such things as Delete the empty index and re-start Indxing, it then reports it couldn't due to an unexpected error.
4) Some folks have pointed to another faulty invisible file variously naming it '.metadate_never_index' and '.metadataneverindex', to be found in '.hostconfig' or eleswhere at the root and destroyed, but I never didscovered anything like it. I did perhaps succeed in adding the line: SPOTLIGHT=-YES- to that file, based on another bit of advice, but it seems to have had no effect.
The terrible irony is that I use FindAnyFile and good ol' FileBuddy for all my searching. All I want is to 'Show Item Info' in Finder's View Options. Wouldn't you know that needs the Spotlight 'app'.Assuming the Spotless message is accurate, I need to convince the MetadataServer that indexing for that partition is enabled. How do I do that
Info:
McBk w/10.6.8, QkSlvrG4 w/10.3,10.4
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Apr 6, 2010
Can someone please give me the specifics on a 3.5 internal hard drive for my iMac G5 (17") running Leopard. My old HD was getting very full so I decided to replace it. I bought a Seagate 3.5 1TB at Staples ("good for PC or Mac"), brought it home, ripped into my iMac, removed the old HD and opened the new Seagate. Turns out it was for tower computers only. Took it back to Staples, where I learned that iMac HDs are Apple specific.
Called the local Apple store. Was told that they didn't carry HDs in stock but I could schedule an appointment with the Genius Bar and someone there could determine what I need. I know what I need -- a new HD --I just don't know where to get one or order it online because descriptions from online suppliers are not generous with the knowledge about what works with what. Never thought it would be so frustrating just to buy a replacement drive.
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May 12, 2009
I'm searching for a file in Finder. When I select "Preferences", which is the directory I'm in, it finds the file but when I select "This Mac" it doesn't.
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Jun 24, 2010
I am pretty new with Mac and I am trying out my new macbook pro. I'm trying to get to know it. And a while ago I was trying the Spotlight feature. I have a file under User/Library/Preferences/ that is called [URL] I just thought I'd try to search for it on Spotlight if it can find it. I typed myname123 on spotlight but no results were found. Why? Are there any specific strings that should be entered if the search string is between a filename?
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May 14, 2012
I want to list the files (Canon images, file names of the form img_xxxx) stored on an external drive (named WINBACK), a partition on a USB HDD. What I did:Â
1. Clicked on drive WINBACK in Finder.
2. Typed img in spotlight search box - Finder window changed to the full spotlight window. Window shows <Search: 'This Mac' "WINBACK">
3. Changed 'Contents' to 'File Name' so top line of display showed < Search: 'This Mac'Â "WINBACK"Â | 'File Name' >.
4. Clicked + to give a search line.
5. On search line changed 'Kind' to 'Name', changed 'matches' to 'begins with' from the drop down lists and then typed 'img_' into the search box.
6. Clicked + to give another search line.
7. Changed 'Kind' to 'File extension', and typed 'jpg' into the search box.
8. This gave a list of files img_xxxx.jpg (obviously 0 < xxxx < 10,000).Â
As there appeared to be some duplicates I checked the paths of the files. Some were from "WINBACK" but most were from various locations on the internal drive.Â
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Feb 11, 2009
Recently the application icons in Spotlight's search window look odd. There's no problem with the search itself, Spotlight hasn't slowed down, the indexing seems ok, in fact the whole system appears to be ok, let aside these odd looking icons.
Logging out or restarting the system works for a while, 3 Spotlight searches to be precisely, the icons are fine for a while, but the fourth search returns every application icon the way it is seen on the screenshots I made.
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Jun 25, 2009
My MBP 17 (2.6 GHz, model 4.1) with  128 SSD isn't finding files which are definitely on my drive. Seem to only find files on the desktop, but not in sub folders for some reason. Any ideas why? Is it the SSD thats not indexing properly? How can I reset or fix this. Its becoming annoying
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Jul 13, 2009
Is there a way to search Google in Spotlight search? I am running 10.5.7 if it helps.
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Jul 25, 2009
Is there a way to bring up a 'form' to do a search*, so I can type in, for example, start and/ or end dates for the files I am interested in, or types of files, or a word in a file, or a part of the folder 'tree' its beneath, etc?? I know I can do this in spotlight but then I have to know, remember or lookup all the syntax and get it correct, much too much hassle for infrequent searches.
I'm presuming someone must have come up with a simple app that front ends a potentially complex spotlight query with a form? Or is there even a native facility to do this in OSX?
* Like you can in WinXP for example, not that I'm trolling, its just that it was sooo much easier in XP and I'm hoping I'm missing something obvious :-(
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Oct 14, 2009
I have a list if 600 servers, and folder full of escalation documentation. What I'm looking for is the easiest way to feed spotlight that list and return a list of documents that contain at least one of those servers. We're moving a datacenter and I want to start figuring out what docs need to be updated.
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May 8, 2010
I noticed that after I use spotlight to launch an app - say Pages for example, Pages launches but Spotlight continues to search for all files with "pages" in the background - slowing down the system. Is there a setting somewhere that will make Spotlight stop searching / clear the search after launching the result?
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Mar 14, 2009
I'm running Leopard 10.5.6 on a PowerBook G4. I installed Leopard about five days ago, from Tiger. (Possibly relevant: I was evaluating Together when I discovered this problem. Together is an information manager which uses Spotlight for its own indexing.) I don't know if this problem existed before installing Together, since I had only 3-4 days of use and I don't think I tried a Contents search before. (I really don't think it's Together, but it's _something_.)
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Apr 5, 2012
I have tried everything to fix Spotlight search with no luck. I have deleted the index file in the root directory with out success. and tried several other ways of tring to re index my machine. As you can see from my screen shots. There is a file called Apps on the desktop. Yest when I search the desktop it cant find it.
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Jun 8, 2012
How to best use the Spotlight and or Command+F find/search feature unsion Lion 10.7? Specifically, I am looking to filter the search to "Name Contains". I know if I Com+F, I can apply that filter with a couple more clicks. And Spotlight can initiate the search. The problem with this method is Show All in Finder leaves no way to apply the Name Contains filter unless I go back and edit the results, then I can drop down and select the filter.
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