MacOS – External hard drive not indexed by Spolight on Mac OS X Mountain Lion

hard driveindexingmacosspotlight

I recently bought a new hard drive and it is not indexed by Finder. I tried to get it re-indexed by following this tutorial: http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-10330114-263.html and I even tried something with commands in the terminal, no luck to get it indexed.

My previous external hard drives (Western Digital SE Elements) that crashed were indexed, but I was using Leopard and Snow Leopard back then.

I am using a Macbook pro 13" mid-2009 edition and my external drive is a 500Gb Toshiba Stor.E Canvio.

Does it have to do that I uninstalled software I used back then on Leopard to be able to read NTFS drives?

Best Answer

From the Terminal application type the following:

mdutil -s /Volumes/<your_disk_name>/

If indexing is disabled you will get something like that:

/Volumes/<your_disk_name>:
Indexing disabled.

You can turn it on by typing (it will request your password):

sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/<your_disk_name>/

Now erase all the existing entries in the index for that drive (if any):

mdutil -E /Volumes/<your_disk_name>/

Check that indexing has been enabled:

mdutil -s /Volumes/<your_disk_name>/

If indexing is enabled you will get something like that:

/Volumes/<your_disk_name>:
Indexing enabled.

Now just reboot your system or wait some minutes until Finder begins the indexing.

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