Why Won't Mavericks Index My External Hard Drive?

I have no idea who manufactures Verbatim drives, but I have seen no widespread reports of problems with them so. Does the drive appear in Disk Utility, and if yes, is it mounted?

It's mounted, and it all worked find until I installed Mavericks...

the Spotlight prefs add/remove trick seems to have worked, so it's not a biggie - annoying though...

Same problem here! I see there is still no fix.

"Can you not read, or are you just a bit dim? I have a Verbatim"

LOL

These fan boys drive me nuts too. I've had several problems that I was, everntually able to get a solution to, but I had to post, and repost and post again though wave after wave after wave of reasons why it wasn't apples fault. They don't seem to realize people don't post here for blame, they post here seeking solutions. "It's not apples fault" is NOT a solution. It's not even helpful. Half the time it IS apples fault, and of that other half, there is still something that could be done with the apple settings to at least work about the problem.

Oh, and btb, the reason I found this thread is I'm having exactly the same problem on a thumb drive. That's a lot of companies dropping the ball all at once... or just one.

I recently discovered the same issue with my WD drive. I tried the add/remove fix from spotlight but it did not work for me. Nothing happened. Help.... anyone?

Unfortunately, it seems like the solution might be "wait for Yosemite, cross fingers it's fixed."

Yes, lot's of people are having problems with WD.

That's probably why WD are handing out free data recovery software for when it all goes down the tubes.

I have this problem as well on all of my Macs ever since Mavericks.

Since the problem doesn't exist in previous versions of OS X, the suggestion that it's a manufacturer's fault rather than Apple's fault seems like bulls.

It's also quite pathetic that there doesn't seem to be a solution yet? Or did I miss it?

10.9.4 did seemingly nothing for me on this matter, and I also can't add the harddrive to the spotlight privacy because of an "unknown error".

My USB harddrive is constantly spinning now and getting very hot!

Apple seemingly doesn't "just work" anymore. 😟

This worked for me. The external drive has to be plugged in, it seems the computer doesn't access the external drive index unless the drive is plugged in -maybe it stores the index on the external drive?

This worked for me, thanks to cubbycoltrain. The external drive has to be plugged in, it seems the computer doesn't access the external drive index unless the drive is plugged in -maybe it stores the index on the external drive?

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

dinhr wrote:

This worked for me, thanks to cubbycoltrain. The external drive has to be plugged in, it seems the computer doesn't access the external drive index unless the drive is plugged in -maybe it stores the index on the external drive?

Right in one try. To be specific the index is stored in the drive volume directory as is most meta data, tags, etc. Separate index files have not been used since Spotlight replaced Sherlock several years ago (maybe OS X 10.4?).

Yeah, I remember Sherlock showed all the indexes.

How do I get at, or see, the drive volume directory?

dinhr wrote:

Yeah, I remember Sherlock showed all the indexes.

How do I get at, or see, the drive volume directory?

Finder is one way to see the volume directory but it does not show all the content. For that you will need something like the sector editor in Drive Genius. Since there is no text, you will need to be adept in reading binary/hexadecimal. A thorough working knowledge of the structure of the Mac OS Extended (journaled) format would be extremely helpful to understanding what you will see in Sector Edit. That information can be found by joining the Apple Developer's Group and searching for the documents in their files.

Well, er... I guess it's not that important to me. That is way to technical for me, (I'll bet you figured that.) Thanks for your response. dinhr