My external hard drive doesn't work with Spotlight and tags.

Hey nimrodelmedley,

If that alert appears when running First Aid on it from Disk Utility, there's an issue with the drive data or the drive itself. You'll want to do as the alert recommends, and back up any data that's on the drive, then reformat it. Reformatting will erase all data on the drive, so you'll want to be sure you've backed up the data or moved it to a new location. More details and steps can be found in the following guides:

Repair a storage device in Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support

Erase and reformat a storage device in Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support

Let us know how it goes.

Take care!

nimrodelmedley wrote:

Solutions I've tried so far:

#1 - 've added my external hard drive to Spotlight Privacy, and I've reset the indexing, but it didn't help.

#2 - I've restarted spotlight used the following command: sudo mdutil -E / but it didn't help.

#1 - I have to ask the obvious question here: did you subsequently remove the drive. from the Spotlight Privacy?

#2 - that Terminal command only rebuilds the index for the boot drive, not external drives. The command for all attached drives is:

sudo mdutil -Ea

Have you installed and run any "cleaning", "optimizing", "speed-up", anti-virus or VPN apps on your Mac?

Note: if the drive is not formatted OS X Extended (journaled) or APFS it can't be indexed or searched by Spotlight.

Old Toad, since upgrading to a MacMini M2 with Sonoma, I have all kinds of issues with multiple external drives (drives sleep immediately after using them, wake intermittently while computer is sleeping, get occasional "disc ejected improperly" messages, etc), including Spotlight not completely returning results (search of whole volume often shows correct results; searching select individual folders does not). I have re-indexed drives multiple time, multiple ways. Drives are formatted either APFS or Mac OS extended. I do have a VPN installed, although I don't use it all the time, and disks act about the same whether VPN in use or not. Was curious how that affects Sonoma's interaction with external hard drives?

My setup: MacMini M2, Sonoma latest update, direct connect to Mac ports, best Apple USB cables, multiple brands of ExHDs (including newly purchased drives to see if that would help). Do not have the cleaning, optimizing, anti-virus apps you mentioned.

I've reached my limit on help with M1s and Sonoma. Don't have a silicon Mac nor Sonoma so can experiment with different options.