Unable to search network drives with Lion...

I am having the same problem and I just heard back from an Apple Tec stating that the engineers purposly removed the ability to Spotlight External / Networked hard Drives.

WHAT THE H*LL WERE THEY THINKING. Why would the engineers take out the the ability to index External and Networked Drives?

Removing this feature slows me down to a crawl. I have 100's of files stored on USB Hard Drives at home and 1000's of files store on our company Network at work that I now have to look at line by line and folder by folder to find a file that I need.

What is the point of SpotLight if I can not find anything store on external drives?

@Ericparagon: it truly depends who you talk to, what the answer will be. I have had this mindblowing answer myself once, asked for second line, got denied, asked for his supervisor, got denied, cursed the guy, hung up and dialed again, but since I have now spoken to about 7 people and the other people concluded it must be a bug, I'm inclined to believe democratic rules, and this one guy just has to be a bad apple. Also, since it was escalated to engineering, I think that points to something they want to solve rather leave by design.

thanks for your suggestion Ahenket, but i'm a rookie with Mac and a basic in technical/system language

i use the easyfind and nothing appears (network hard disk) so i've to wait for better days. oh my old leopard!

Final word from me. This is what I got back from support:

I finally received word back from my escalation and was told that it was the expected behavior. I was offered to have it marked as an enhancement request, which I already took the liberty in doing so.

This makes me revert to Snow Leopard, no matter how painful that will be without a backup, because Lion killed that too. Lion is not fit for purpose and I'm going to file for money back.

Numerous follow ups, no response so I am done with Lion. With the search problems, broken apps, increasing internet reliability problems, bluetooth connectivty failures, black screens and increasing liklihood of my iMac not waking up from sleep, I finally made the decision to rollback using Time Machine to Snow Leopard.

After a big of jiggling with my contacts and my iPhone, I now have a fully functional system again... overall process took 2 hours...

Perhaps when these bugs and other issues are resolved in Lion I might switch back but for now, I have my happy Mac face back on...

😀

Has anybody managed to get a refund for Lion yet?

Just read this on Mac Rumours:

Mac Rumours wrote:

Apple is picking up the pace of OS X 10.7.2 developer seeds as it moves toward a public launch of iCloud and iOS 5, today pushing out Build 11C57 to developers for testing. As with the previous seed, which came just five days ago, the iCloud components have been rolled into OS X 10.7.2. iCloud has previously been a separate download for beta testers. Apple continues to list no known issues with the latest build, and has made no changes to its list of focus areas for testing, which include AddressBook, GraphicsDrivers, iCal, iChat, iCloud, Mac App Store, Mail, MobileMe, Safari, Spotlight, and Time Machine.

So it seems that Apple still believe that there is no problem with Lion's Spotlight. They seriously can''t expect everyone do ditch their server set up and buy an Apple server. That's ludicrous.

So, as per my previous question. Has anyone received a refund yet? Maybe they will listen if everyone starts asking for their money back. I'm tired of this now.

Ive updated my router firmware, Im connecting from a new macbook pro to a mac pro tower through the router with updated firmware and I still get ZERO results when searching shared volumes. I can browse volumes but not search them.

Everything was fine till lion.

GRR...

Funny: I use a Windows 7 laptop to connect to a Snow Leopard machine shared volume and can search perfectly..... using my brand new mac book pro on LION I cant search the same volume. This is JUNK until its fixed.

FOR EVERYONE HAVING ISSUES WITH SEARCHING NETWORKED DRIVES on OTHER MACHINES on YOUR NETWORK.... TEMPORARY WORKAROUND

A temporary workaround is to create a VNC account (System Prefrences - Sharing), and login to the machine with the networked drives you are looking to search, open a finder window on that machine and search from there.

If you turn on full paths in Finder settings you can easily see where the file you were looking for is AND/OR create a folder on that drive and copy files to it for easy BROWSE TO via the network share Finder window.

Not elegant but I hope this helps some people!

Kevlar

On Machine with Shared drives you would like to access remotely and search by CONNECTING TO

Select the following menus -

System Preferences - Sharing - ENABLE -SCREEN SHARING -

Select COMPUTER SETTINGS - Check VNC VIEWS may control screen with password: - CREATE A GOOD PASSWORD FOR THIS - CLICK OK -

In "ALLOW ACCESS FOR" - Select "only these users", Select "+" sign to add a user, Add your user name - Select "OK"

Before leaving Screen Sharing page, make sure SCREEN SHARING is checked in Service list on left side of screen.

-------

On Machine you are connecting FROM

Click on backdrop to make finder the Foreground APP

PRESS - COMMAND + K - (Connect to server) - SELECT BROWSE - SELECT MACHINE YOU WANT TO CONNECT TO WITH SCREEN SHARE - (Double click its name in list) - SELECT "SHARE SCREEN" on top right of window below search bar, TYPE IN USER NAME AND PASSWORD

A Window will open with a virtual copy of the desktop of the other machine. As long as your cursor is inside this window, everything operates like you are on the other machine. Find files, copy, delete, pretty much everything. Find your files, note down their path so you can browse via the network normally, OR copy to a pre-created folder for ease of finding.

IMPORTANT NOTE AND WARNING !!! - You are logged into the other machine like you are ON THAT MACHINE. Anything you change, changes on that machine for GOOD so BE CAREFUL!!!

Hope this helps!

Kev

Using Screen Share is easy when two macs are inolved and its free. Mac to PC aparently little more tricky. I'll have to check out Easy Find, thanks for the heads up.

We are still left with, APPLE PLEASE FIX THIS.

Just trying to help!

K

Searching network volumes worked like a charm on Snow Leopard, no matter if SMB or AFP ... but things are still broken under Lion 10.7.2. Would be nice if Apple could comment on this. When can we expect a fix ?

Thank you very much,

Harald

Has anybody had any joy installing Samba in Lion, does that work?

It's not something I'm familiar with so I may be barking up the wrong tree, of course, but it appears that the problem is stemming from Samba not being included with Lion?

EasyFind is great but we really shouldn't have to use a seperate app to find files in the "world's most advanced operating system".

I'm finding that all OS X Lion users in our university environment connected to an enterprise SAN (EMC) SMB shares cannot use finder to search their mounted share volumes.

EasyFind from the app store is the only work-a-round we've found so far, but we'd be much happier if it just got fixed!

I don't have anything new to add but am adding to the post count to hopefully escalate the issue.

I can't believe there isn't a fix for this! Imagine the uproar if this was an issue in a new release of windows!!

This destroys workflow for assembling catalogues from network files in indesign. Everyone else is on windows in my office and you should see the looks I get when I say I can no longer search the network drive with the NEW mac OS. Booooo apple, GET ON THIS!!!!!!!!!!!!!