Why Won't Mavericks Index My External Hard Drive?

I've got the same problem and the spotlight pref add and delete doesn't work. Cannot believe how painful and useless Mavericks is. Haven't had an upgrade w/ this many continual stumbling blocks since I jumped from 9 to OSX. At least that jump had learning curves. Mavericks has just been OS issue after OS issue.

Entering terminal commands every time I have to search for a file on my external is the kind of DOS malarky Apple was supposed to save the world from. Words, no words.

After a year, I'm surprised Apple never released any fix for this major bug.

In my situation, I have multiple removable drives, and curiously only one out of 6 or so would actually index itself.

After reading nirurin's steps, I found something interesting. The only drive in my system that was actually indexing was the one named without any spaces. All the others had spaces in their name.

So I now attempted to rename all my drives, replacing the space with a '_' and using nirurin's steps below

sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/'name_of_your_drive'

sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/'name_of_your_drive'

cd /Volumes/'name_of_your_drive'

sudo rm -fr .Spotlight-V100

sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/'name_of_your_drive'

If this fails to work, I'll report back here. But hopefully this has been the reason for no indexing on removable drives. And if it is, then shame on you Apple.

After about 3 weeks and a few reboots, indexing on my external drives is still working just fine. So the solution as I posted just above should work for others. Just make sure your drive name doesn't contain any spaces.

Beyond me why this only broke as of Mavericks. Indexing on drives with spaces worked on at least the last 5 revisions of OSX.

I'm having the same problem as the original poster. I recently updated to Mavericks so that my mac would stop pestering me to do so, and now my (seagate) external hard drive won't index and I can't search it. There are hundreds of folders on it and I have clients asking for files all the time which would normally take 2 mins to find and now I can't find them at all.

I can't charge my employer for an hour's work that just involved sending over a couple of files, even though that'll probably be how long it takes to find them, if at all.

I've ordered a new external hard drive, can I format the new one in a different way to make the indexing work? And then transfer all my files on it?

No need to buy another drive or reformat. Just rename your external drive so that it doesn't have any blank spaces in it. The drive should re-index itself and work fine after that. If not, just look a couple of posts up for a more detailed fix based on nirurin's steps.

My external hard drive didn't have any blank spaces in it's name. And there's no way I'm renaming all the files on it as there's over 100k on there. I tried the fix that nirurin mentioned and that worked once, but when I unplugged the drive and inserted it back in it wouldn't index it again.

My new external hard drive is the same brand as my previous one (seagate) however I've set to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and transfered the majority of my files onto it and it seems to index fine.

Well, all of a sudden I had the same issue with my seagate external drive. It would show me that it indexes for hours without doing anything really and the search results would flash before they completely disappear. I did some googling, and after taking the following steps the external hard-disk is being indexed and search results are just showing up fine 🙂

1. added the external hard disk in the privacy tab in the spotlight prefs, so that it's not index anymore

2. pressed the little minus "-" and took the drive again off that list

3. opened the terminal and entered these commands:

sudo mdutil -i on "/Volumes/your drive name"

enter the password and I also entered this one (not sure it's needed though)

sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/your drive name

4. that's it, I ejected and reconnected the drive and it starts indexing right away.

Since then it has been indexed once and the search function works as expected!