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searching my external hard drive

I have the latest MacBook Pro, Lion, a Time Capsule (1TB) and a 1TB external hard drive connected to my Time Capsule. I access my external drive via my WiFi network.


The other day I was trying to find a file that I believed to be on my external hard drive. I tried to use Spotlight to find it, but no luck. But I didn't trust the search results and started to browse my drive. And that's when I noticed that my Spotlight results were not very good. It appears that Spotlight is not able to find the files on my external HD very well. I tried searching for a file I first confirmed was actually on the drive and Spotlight could not find it. Does this mean I have to fix the index of my external HD? Is this a bug with Lion? If it's my index, how do I repair it? (I don't use this drive often and when I do, I usually just navigate to the folder where my files are. I'm not a big Spotlight user, but this time I needed to find a specific file. So I'm not sure when the searching problem started - before or after the Lion upgrade...)

Safari 5.1-OTHER, Mac OS X (10.7), MacBook Pro (latest model, 17")

Posted on Aug 9, 2011 6:57 AM

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Posted on Aug 9, 2011 7:24 AM

Add the external drive to the Privacy pane in the Spotlight system preference pane, close and reopen the pane, and remove the external drive from Privacy. In normal circumstances that will trigger a rebuild of the index. Allow it to complete and see if that improves the searches. If not, post back and someone can probably provide additional suggestions.


Regards.

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Aug 9, 2011 7:24 AM in response to Paul Oldewurtel

Add the external drive to the Privacy pane in the Spotlight system preference pane, close and reopen the pane, and remove the external drive from Privacy. In normal circumstances that will trigger a rebuild of the index. Allow it to complete and see if that improves the searches. If not, post back and someone can probably provide additional suggestions.


Regards.

Aug 10, 2011 4:50 PM in response to varjak paw

I'm not sure if this worked for me. How do I know when the computer or Spotlight is indexing the drive? From the Mac OS help files, it suggests there would be an indication that Spotlight is indexing in the Spotlight search bar. But I don't see this happen.


Another question... Maybe I am misunderstanding how to use Spotlight. If I use the Spotlight that is on my desktop, in the upper-right hand corner, I should be able to search everything, right? The harddrive on my laptop and the external drive that's attached to my Time Capsule? Or do I have to use the Spotlight search bar that's part of the Finder window after I have navigated to my external drive in the Shared portion of my Finder window? I thought I could search from anywhere with Spotlight.

Aug 10, 2011 5:34 PM in response to Paul Oldewurtel

One other thing... When I open Disk Utility, should I see my Time Capsule and the external hard drive attached to my Time Capule listed on the left? All I see is the internal hard drive of my laptop and my Superdrive. My Time Capsule appears to be working - the last backup was this morning at 8:29 AM (how often do they occur?) - and I am able to see my Time Capsule and my external hard drive in my Finder. I can navigate thru the folders on my external HD and open stuff. Just not sure if they're supposed to be there in Disk Utility or not. I did recently have a problem with my Time Capsule backup, where I had to erase the drive and create a whole new backup. Not sure what killed my old backup but I have been fine backing up since then. (And this issue also came up after I had upgraded to Lion.)

Aug 11, 2011 7:06 AM in response to Paul Oldewurtel

How do I know when the computer or Spotlight is indexing the drive? From the Mac OS help files, it suggests there would be an indication that Spotlight is indexing in the Spotlight search bar. But I don't see this happen.


Normally you will see an indicator that it's indexing in the menubar dropdown for Spotlight, yes. That you aren't seeing one could just be an indication that the index has occured, something possible if you don't have much data on your external drive, or it could be an indication of a problem with Spotlight such that it's not indexing. If you do have a significant amount of data on the drive but you don't see any indication of indexing when you put the drive into the Privacy pane and then remove it, post back and someone can provide instructions on how to delete the Spotlight index for that drive to force a complete reindex.


Another question... Maybe I am misunderstanding how to use Spotlight. If I use the Spotlight that is on my desktop, in the upper-right hand corner, I should be able to search everything, right? The harddrive on my laptop and the external drive that's attached to my Time Capsule? Or do I have to use the Spotlight search bar that's part of the Finder window after I have navigated to my external drive in the Shared portion of my Finder window?


There is only Spotlight. All you have is two different interfaces to the same back-end technology. The search in the menu bar is intended for quick searches, while the search from a Finder window allows a GUI way of tailoring the search results.


When I open Disk Utility, should I see my Time Capsule and the external hard drive attached to my Time Capule listed on the left?


I don't believe so, not in Disk Utility, but I'm not sure not having a Time Capsule. Someone else here can probably answer that, or you can ask in the Time Capsule forum.


Regards.

Aug 11, 2011 8:15 AM in response to varjak paw

I found instructions on how to force Spotlight to do a complete reindex. And I was finally able to see it taking time to index my internal harddrive. It gave me a progress bar. But I'm pretty sure it only indexed my internal hard drive. After it was completed, I tried searching for something on my external drive and Spotlight couldn't find it. I then tried using the Privacy panel trick again, to see if that would get it to index the external drive, but again no luck. My external drive has hundreds of gigs of data on it.


Also, I noticed that my external drive never appeared as an icon on my harddrive, but I had apparently turned that off in the preferences. So I checked the boxes to make everything appear and there was my drive. I could use that icon to Get Info about the drive. Great. But then at some point, it disappeared. If my drive is always connected to my Time Capsule, should the icon always appear on my desktop or do I have to wake it up before the icon will appear? Something related to this is I noticed that at times when would let me laptop sleep overnight, it would give me a warning message that it could not connect to the shared drive, which made no sense since my laptop was asleep. Am I having network issues with my WiFi?


Another thing I tried was I reset my PRAM and that seemed to get my Time Machine backups to work again. This is not the first time I have had to do the PRAM reset on this 2011 MacBook Pro. Originally, I was having trouble with my trackpad not always responding to taps and with my laptop not waking up from sleep properly. Resetting the PRAM fixed that, but I was still having the occassional trackpad weirdness. I don't want to have to keep resetting my PRAM - it must be a sign that something is not functioning properly, right?

Aug 11, 2011 8:24 AM in response to Paul Oldewurtel

If you're constantly having to reset the PRAM to get Time Machine to work or your trackpad to work, that is indeed an indicator of a problem with the system. It could be an issue with the OS, or it could be hardware.


I'm getting out of my depth when it comes to disks connected to a Time Capsule and what would be normal since I don't have one; it may be different from what happens with a disk connected directly to the computer. There may be something you need to set to get a disk connected to a Time Capsule to be indexed, since that's more like a server volume than a directly-connected drive. So I'm going to have to defer to someone here who has a Time Capsule and therefore can be more accurate when discussing that situation. Again, you might ask in the Time Capsule forum.


Regards.

Mar 1, 2012 3:14 PM in response to chusa83

chusa83 wrote:


I found a solution using a terminal command line:


http://alejandro.corredorparra.com/post/17614943257/how-to-force-spotlight-to-in dex-a-volume-external

It works, it works!!!!

Thanks a lot chusa83.


Before this I went to the system preferences, clicked in spotlight, clicked in the privacy pane, and when I chose my external hd (lacie rikiki 500 gb) the system told me this was a time machine device, so spotlight only would search fot time machine copies-backups. Just in case I closed the pane, re-opened again, and I removed the external hd, as Dave Sawyer and many others have suggested here and in different forums, with no success in my particular case.


However, with this command spotlight is indexing my lacie rikiki for the fisrt time.

THANK YOU!!!

🙂

And thank you to Alejandro Corredor Parra as well...

searching my external hard drive

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