Why Won't Mavericks Index My External Hard Drive?

The problem is not external drives in general. Gtech, OWC, NewerTech, and other external enclosures, togetehr with a wide variety of "thumb drives" all work perfectly well. Some Western Digital external enclosures have off and on had compatibility issues with Macs for years mainly because of proprietary bridge chips in Western Digital external enclosures. FWIW a Western Digital drive in an OWC enclosure works just fine with Mavericks.

I have a WD external drive which has worked with spotlight since (at least) 10.5. I installed Mavericks yesterday, and it has stopped being indexed by Spotlight. I receive the following:

sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/Foundation1

/Volumes/Foundation1:

Indexing disabled.

("Foundation1" is the drive name.)

Finding it hard to believe this is a problem with WD since it's been working perfectly until now.

I'm having the same issue. I did the temporary fix of adding it to Privacy then removing it, but now it doesn't even fix the problem at all. This really *****.

Same for me in Mavericks.

No WD Drives used, but not able to search on external drives at all which realy ads some office hours to find my stuff !

Please get this solved a.s.a.p. - i'd call this a major bug !

xmiller wrote:

Will Wd or Apple be paying for all the people's recovery of data?

WD are supplying Data Recovery software, they caused the problem with poorly written software, so they get to bear the cost.

However, if you lost data and the Recovery software can't recover it you are out of luck.

Don't buy WD

WD didnt cause the problem, the problem happens on other brands of hard drives too, which you should know if you'd read this thread properly.

The fault/bug is in Apples software, its nothing to do with the hard drives.

On the subject of trying to fix the issue, what format do you guys have your external drives in? I found that the problems I was having was on a drive formatted to ExFAT. When I reformatted it to the journalled format, everything worked fine (for me, anyway).

It seems to be a bug in the Apple software/drivers that cant handle the ExFAT file system, at least from what happened with me.

nirurin wrote:

It seems to be a bug in the Apple software/drivers that cant handle the ExFAT file system, at least from what happened with me.

It isn't that OS X can't handle the ExFAT system rather that the ExFAT system does not have the capability to store the Spotlight data in its directory structure as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) does. And if Apple were somehow able to shoehorn the Spotlight index data into the ExFAT directory, Windows would not be able to read the directory structure either. Sherlock, Spotlight's predecessor, stored its index data in separate index files but that turned out to be far too limiting and limited to work with today's systems with literally millions of files. FindAnyFile or EasyFind, both available from the App Store, will do a linear search of any volume type for a wide variety of criteria but because they are not indexed the search can take a while to complete. Both were born in the days of Sherlock to overcome its limitations.

ExFat is a terrible file system, (no file table redundancy is especially egregious). It was designed as a simple system for mobile devices. If you use it, you should backup every hour.

For Macs you use MacOS Extended (Journaled) For Windows it's NTFS, both are robust systems.

nirurin wrote:

WD didnt cause the problem,

They think they did, that's why they are supplying data recovery software to the users that lost data. Windows and Mac users.

But you are free to think what you want.

Ok, I'll rephrase.... WD did not cause *this specific* problem that this thread is related to. Whatever the data loss issue is, it is unrelated to this thread, apart from the original poster owning a WD hard drive.

I had the exact same issue, and my drive was Buffalo. It has also happened on Seagate drives that I know of.

So either every hard drive manufacturer has a inherant flaw... or its Apple.

If you are also suffering from some sort of data loss problem, then you have a totally different issue. This thread is about spotlight indexing. WD issuing data recover software is very interesting information, but completely irrelevant to the matter at hand.

As for your comment about ExFat, MacOS Ext does not work on windows, and NTFS does not work on OSX, so if you need the external drive working on both systems (as well as xbox/android/other) then ExFAT is the only choice, or at least the simplest.

Fortunatly I have two external drives, so I was able to make the main one MacOS and the smaller one ExFAT for any transfers I needed. Not everyone has this choice though.

For the people having the problem that this thread is actually about (eg. the spotlight indexing forever), if your external drive is formatted to ExFAT try changing it to MacOS and see if that solves the issue. It did for me. Apple have dragged their heels solving the problem, and it doesnt look like its going to be done anytime soon.

Using Disk Utility, note that everything on the drive will be erased by this so save it somewhere else before you do,

nirurin wrote:

Ok, I'll rephrase.... WD did not cause *this specific* problem that this thread is related to. Whatever the data loss issue is, it is unrelated to this thread, apart from the original poster owning a WD hard drive.

I had the exact same issue, and my drive was Buffalo. It has also happened on Seagate drives that I know of.

So either every hard drive manufacturer has a inherant flaw... or its Apple.

I have WD, Seagate, Hitachi and HGST external drives, I also have a LaCie and a Buffalo NAS. They all work, this not a system bug or we would all be affected.

What did Buffalo have to say when you contacted them for support.

i don't have a WD drive but my external drive wasn't indexing (or so it appeared).

this quickly solved my problem...

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2409?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US