Spotlight comments?

[shawnperson]

I have some non-essential files on an external hard drive. I was trying to use spotlight as a quick and dirty organizer, but it only works on my internal drive. Is that just how it is? Or maybe I have something in system preferences set that way? In system preferences spotlight has permission to search everything and everywhere.

Any help would be much appreciated, thanks.

 

[MrMacMack]

Can you explain more about what you are wanting to do?

 

[Drew017]

Are you trying to make spotlight to index your external drive as well as your internal? I think it should automatically do that…

 

[Weaselboy]

I have some non-essential files on an external hard drive. I was trying to use spotlight as a quick and dirty organizer, but it only works on my internal drive. Is that just how it is? Or maybe I have something in system preferences set that way? In system preferences spotlight has permission to search everything and everywhere.

Any help would be much appreciated, thanks.

External drives are automatically excluded from the Spotlight index. Connect the external drive then go to the Spotlight panel in System Prefs. and in the Privacy pane remove the external drive from the list. It will then be indexed and show in your Spotlight searches.

 

[shawnperson]

External drives are automatically excluded from the Spotlight index. Connect the external drive then go to the Spotlight panel in System Prefs. and in the Privacy pane remove the external drive from the list. It will then be indexed and show in your Spotlight searches.

I actually had to manually add the external drive to the privacy pane, and then I removed it. After repeating this process-and restarting-several times, it worked. The first few times, it started indexing the external drive but stopped after 30 seconds or so. I don't know why it worked the last time.

Thanks everyone.