Spotlight Not working

First, how is the eternal drive formatted? For Spotlight to be able to be indexed and searched it must be either formatted APFS or OS X Extended (journaled) and connected by cable to the Mac. Anything else will not work.

Then rebuild the Spotlight index on the external drive as follows:

1 - Open the System/Siri & Spotlight settings and and click on the Privacy button:

2 - In the next window click on the "+" button and select the external drive to be excluded.

3 - Close the System settings app and reboot.

4 - Repeat Steps 1 - 2 and remove the external drive from the Exclusion list.

It will take some time to complete the indexing so do this before stopping for the day and don't shutdown or sleep your Mac. Just use the Screen Saver and don't put the Mac to sleep.

This is also explained in this Apple document: How to rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac - Apple Support  

Open your external HD to its top level and push Command + Shift + . (Command,Shift,Period) to show hidden files. If you have a file named ".metadata_never_index", delete it. Use the same key sequence to hide the hidden files again.

The other common tip to reindex the HD is to open  > Siri & Spotlight > Spotlight Privacy and click the + button to add the HD, restart computer, then go back to same same location and delete it. That should initiate a re-index, you may hear drive noise to confirm the process is running.

Hey, I got the exact same issue.

I have an OWC Raid with four drives. It is configured as a RAID5 and formatted as APFS.

I have tried everything in the book. Rebuild the index by manually adding it to the excluded files and taking it out again. Deleting the Spotlight Preferences. Re-indexing using Terminal. Everything people thought of.

Spotlight is not working for that external drive. I do not have the hidden file that was suggested.

OWC Support says for them it is working. I can also see that the drive is being reindexed, but the search still never works.

I do have three hidden files called

.Spotlight-V100

.DocumentRevisions-V100

.TemporaryItems

which I do not have on my main volume.

Any help please? This is not my first rodeo with a Mac, so I have really tried a lot!

Thanks,

i.

Scroll to the bottom of the Spotlight results and choose "Search in Finder". You will have more options to search in different locations on your Mac.

Hello Misschief,

Did you check the date on those files? Have they been updated? If not, did you try to delete them?

... agreed Spotlight is broken,

no longer display file info

no longer drags images

index never finishes

to name just a few issues.

Mac Mini M2 Sonoma 14.2.1.