Q: Unable to search network drives with Lion...

Great tip--thanks. I made up a couple of search paradigms for much searched Win 7 directories and popped them onto my Dock. Saves a lot of time and unlike EasyFinf one can save searches.

Same problem, i can't fix it, we need a reply from Apple !

This was the last update I got from Apple on 02 August to this issue:

I have received a response from the Engineering team regarding your concern.

Mac OS X uses Spotlight to write indexes into other disks.  The drives being NTFS, means that the Mac natively does not have write access to them. The FAT32 thumb drive has a format where the Mac has write access.

Since this setup was working for you before, may I ask if there is any 3rd Party application that you used to access and Spotlight the disks?

This was my reply:

Thanks for the update. 

I am experiencing this issue not just with my local NTFS drive (which I have both read and write access to), but also the SMB shares on my network and also my Windows 7 PC.  I have never used a third-party product to search for files on the network prior to installing OSX Lion.  On OSX Snow Leopard, network SMB share spotlight searches worked perfectly, and they stopped working immediately after the installation of Lion.

It appears that a number of other people who have recently upgraded to Lion are also experiencing the same issues, here is a link to one example of a thread that can be found on the Apple Support Communities website:

https://discussions.apple.com/message/15823270#15823270

It appears that the installation of Lion has introduced a bug that prevents Spotlight from indexing network drives and that I am not the only person experiencing this issue.  Please note that as I stated on our support call, I have no problems whatsoever reading or writing to the network shares, it is only the searching that is broken and returns 0 results.  Based on my observation, Spotlight is not even attempting to perform the search.

Here is a grab of the local NTFS drive, as you can see I have read/write access to this disk.

No response yet, I followed up again today and will post findings...

Thanks for the update Tom.

It seems that Apple really aren't taking this problem seriously at all, which is shocking when you take into account how many people are having the same issue.

Hopefully we'll get a fix soon enough.

Same problems here. It seems i just can't search from the root of the drive. I can perform a search if i delve into one of the folders though, though it obviously only then searches that particular folder...

One of my network volumes is Appleshare, and the others arer SMB. All acting the same here.

Spotlight needs a fix. I'm running Lion btw.

I am also having this problem. That's very annoying, since our server is a Windows server, and I need to work with thousands of files.. No problem before I installed Lion yesterday.

This problem has nothing to do with third party tools. I never used third party tools for search before Lion forced me too... Just so I could  search for files on SMB network shares. It's a repeated problem that many people have experienced. My understanding is that Apple changed from using SAMBA to their own proporietary SMB implementation and that is why we are experiencing all these issues under Lion. It's not just causing us issue but a lot of vendors. I know Sonos has had issues with the SMB file shares, etc .... Apple needs to relase a fix already

Having the same problem here as well.

Working in an integrated environment (windows/mac) I need to have the ability to search network volumes regardless of file structure. Windows can do it, linux can do it, OSX used to be able to do it very well prior to Lion. This definitely is a very important issue. I am fine with Apple's forward thinking regarding their implementation but they shouldn't just chop out a key peice of functionality from the OS like this. Its very dissapointing.

I am too hoping for a point release that fixes this serious flaw in the operating system. We rely on OSX for work, its not a hobby or home activity. Please Apple engineers take this to heart and provide a fix!

Same problem.

And there's more:

The battery is lasting a half before.

MAC OS X Lion is much heavier.

I just got off the phone with Apple Support not expecting anything. However a PRAM reset did the trick for me. (Restart holding CMD+Opt+P+R and let the machine reboot three times and let go). After that search results returned.

Hope that helps someone else too.

Thanks ahenket! I can't believe I never tried that

Now working here on all our Lion Macs.

Correction. Still not working.

It now searches the top level folder but does not search sub-folders. Still need this fixing, Apple!

Hmhm, indeed, but with a twist. I always get the same result (if it actually matches) three levels deep, although other matching documents exist in other directories. I can only get this one document whatever search argument. Top level documents are not returned ever.

It only matches by name before extension and yields no results based on extension or document type. Lost the ability to search inside network based documents.

Calling Apple again...

Resetting the pram did nothing to fix searching for a file name on an SMB Share ...

Finally got why I only this one document: Apple cheats by searching based on "recently opened documents". This one result was the one document I recently opened from that subfolder. I have tried by opening a few more. All documents I opened are now also found when search for a part of their file name.

So in short: the PRAM reset fixed the fact that nothing was found, but did not bring back network searching.

Still waiting in line for Apple. Lion is keeping them extremely busy...