How do I get Spotlight to index a FAT32 Drive?

Are you sure that Spotlight has not indexed the drive. Check to make sure that he drive is not excluded for indexing and is selected for searching.

You might take a look at this thread:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=3625005&#3625005

I did get Spotlight to search a FAT32 drive using the Terminal command, although as far as I could tell it never did index it (at any rate, there were no index files on the drive). But it would search. Unless you need to share the drive with a Windows machine, I would reformat the drive for the Mac.
Francine


Francine
Schwieder

Well, I just reformatted my trusty key drive to MSDOS and put some stuff on it. Spotlight would not find anything, neither by file name nor content. Of course, you can't put it in Privacy, and I have no idea what in the world the Apple is on about with the "opening the Info window for the volume in the Finder." There is absolutely nothing there about Spotlight.

So I issued the Terminal command and got the expected result:

-bash:~francine$ sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/KEYDRIVE/
Password:
/Volumes/KEYDRIVE/:
Indexing enabled for volume.

I kept an eye on Activity Monitor and saw mdimport belonging to User "unknown" startup and Do Things. After which a Spotlight search on both file names and file contents brought up files on the drive in the results. There is still no sign of index files on the drive itself though. However, looking at the contents of /.Spotlight-V100 I did discover that the file .store.db file does change when I saved a unique file to the keydrive, so perhaps that is where the info is being stored. Of course, I now wonder how in the world you could ever clean that thing out.....
Francine


Francine
Schwieder

OK, the Terminal is a the way that you access UNIX shell commands (the Mac command line interface). Instead of clicking on things you have to type the actual command into the "prompt" hit return, and then the shell executes the command. So you go to the Utilities folder and double click Terminal to launch it. Exactly what you see when it finishes launching will depend on how you have configured it, so it won't be exactly what I see, but there will be some words of encouragement and then the prompt, where you will type things:

Last login: Tue Mar 20 14:06:01 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
-bash:~francine$

The "$" is where you start typing, or you can copy and paste things in also. You would then type:

sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/YOURDRIVENAME/

You must make sure everything you type is exactly as given, thus you may want to simply copy and paste this:

sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/

and, making sure there is no space after that final "/" character, type the name of your drive exactly as it appears in Finder. If the name has any spaces in it be sure to surround it with quotes:

sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/"MY FAT DRIVE"/

Then hit the Return key. You will be asked for your admin password, and given a little lecture (this is only delivered the first time you use a sudo command). The password you type is not echoed to the screen in anyway whatsoever, so type very carefully and when you finish hit the Return key again. You'll then get the notice that indexing is enabled. Type the word exit, hit Return, and then quit Terminal.
Francine


Francine
Schwieder

Next time you access the Terminal you'll see what you see now: a command line prompt waiting for your wish to be its command. To undo you would command it to be off rather than on:

sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/"MY FAT DRIVE"/

Hit Return to execute the command. Provided you remember to type "exit" as a command before you quit Terminal, the command will be saved in the history file, how many previous commands are stored is also a setting you can make, I think the default is a couple of hundred. To see those previous commands you just type:

history

and hit Return. You can copy and paste a previous command to use it again. I've written an introduction to the Terminal if you are interested (knowing the basics can be very handy sometimes):

http://www.pinkmutant.com/smug/macws07/terminal.html

That page has a link at the top to Terminal 101, and a list at the bottom of my own frequently used commands.
Francine


Francine
Schwieder