Q: Spotlight in Yosemite cant search seagate external drive
Hi,
I have a seagate 8TB drive known as the the 'Seagate External Backup Plus.'
I have formatted the drive in ExFat and I have no problems reading or writing to the drive. I am on a Macbook Pro running Yosemite OSX 10.10.2
* The problem is that Spotlight does not search this drive.
Can anyone please help fix this?
I searched the web for few hours now without success. I have also already tried adding and removing the drive to the preferences -> spotlight -> privacy tab. But that did not work
Thanks in advance!
Best
Michael
Posted on Jan 29, 2016 3:39 AM
By the grace of the Almighty, the spotlight works now!
I tried several things, so I will list them for others out there, but I feel that the key thing was inspired by a previous post from Linc Davies on a slightly different but very similar matter (see Eric Root's first suggestion above for that post if you wish). That said here is what worked for me:
All I did was...
1) Turn on the ability to view hidden files on the mac
2) Then in the top-level of the Seagate external drive, there is a hidden folder called: ' .Spotlight-V100 ' -- I deleted that folder.
3) I then ejected the drive.
4) And re-connected the drive. * Now the Spotlight works and search the Seagate drive!
***For clarity I should state the other things I tried before this, as perhaps they contributed to the solution.
I did everything listed in the suggestions given by 'George' in this post:
And I also downloaded the latest Paragon Driver for the Mac form the Seagate Webpage (as suggested by another person trying to fix this problem). I actually already had a version of this software on my computer from before... Maybe having a more recent version helped (?)
-- Thanks for all of the support! So happy that I can now use Spotlight to search through all 8 TB -- manually looking would have been too much.
Jai Karunamayi
Namaste
Posted on Jan 30, 2016 1:30 PM