Windows – Disable / Turn Off Windows 7 Search Prompt / Warning Banner About Indexing

Contrary to all of the posts that I've found on forums regarding adding network folders as libraries and then having them fail to index, it is possible to do this within Windows 7. I managed to fix mine today by using a combination of symbolic links and Windows Media Centre. Obviously this works best if you are trying to include a folder containing Music, Pictures, Videos or Movies etc. although you can also do this for your Documents folder if you like. To include a network folder in a library and have it indexed by Windows 7, follows these instructions:

1. Open Windows Explorer and click Map Network Drive. Set the Drive letter and Folder then click Finish. I did this for my Music folder which is stored on my NAS, so I mapped M: to \\10.1.1.2\Music for example.
2. In Windows Explorer navigate to C:\Users\Username, right-click My Music folder and select Properties from the popup-menu.
3. Click the Location tab then click the Move... button.
4. In the Select a Destination dialog click Computer, select the new M: drive, then click the Select Folder button, or just type M: in the textbox.
5. Click OK. When asked if you want to move all of the files from the old location to the new location click No.
6. Open Windows Media Centre and navigate to Tasks | Settings. Click Media Libraries.
7. Select the Music radio button then click Next.
8. Select the Add folders to the library radio button then click Next.
9. Select the On this computer (includes mapped network drives) radio button then click Next.
10. Tick the checkbox next to the M: network folder containing your Music, e.g. mine was \\10.1.1.2\Music (M:), then click Next.
11. Select the Yes, use these locations radio button then click the Finish button.
12. Wait for Windows Media Centre to finish indexing your folder.
13. Close and re-open Windows Explorer and navigate to your Music library. You should see that it is now pointing to your network folder. If you try the search in the top-right you'll find that it is also indexed.

Btw, I accidentally indexed the same folder twice while doing this so make sure you don't do the same thing! If you do you'll need to go back into Windows Media Centre and select the Remove folders from library radio button.

Enjoy!

Cheers,

Richard

I was having the same problem and found a solution. All my code is stored under a single folder:

F:\projects\

Under that folder are trees of code and related project files that total over 2GB. I constantly need to search this tree and windows Indexing has actually been an extremely useful tool for doing fast searches, so turning it off was not an option. I want to exclude the SVN folders because they clutter up my search results, (2) unnecessary drag on my system, (3) SVN, Win7, and MS Security Essentials seem to not work nicely when doing large SVN operations.

Before you try the solution, reproduce the problem:

1. In Windows Explorer, navigate to your indexed project root (F:\projects\ on my machine).
2. Using the Search bar in the upper-right corner of the Explorer window, search for "svn" (w/o quotes)
3. You should see a trillion useless SVN files & folders like ".svn", and "svn-base" showing up in the results.

Solution:

1. Visit http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowssearch/
2. Download CrawlScopeCommandLine.zip
3. Extract to some place on your machine, and compile the project
4. Open a Console window with administrative rights (Ctrl+Shift+Left-click on the "Command Prompt" item in the Start menu).
5. Navigate to wherever you compiled the above project to.
6. Execute the csmcmd.exe with the /add_rule param (use /? first for syntax).
7. In my case I entered the following command: csmcmd.exe /add_rule file:///F:\projects\*\.svn\* /USER /EXCLUDE

I figured this out by first running the command: csmcmd.exe /enumerate_rules, to list all the existing ones. There were already some rules with asterix (*) wildcard's being used by Windows, so it was proof this was possible.

Now repeat the steps to reproduce the issue, and you should no longer see the SVN clutter in your search results. Give the computer sometime to update the indexes -- this took less than 5 minutes on my system. Sometimes restarting the Search service, kicking off a rebuild/reindex, or a reboot help move things along.

Update: Some of my SVN projects use ".svn", and some use "_svn", so I've added these two rules to every drive:

csmcmd.exe /add_rule file:///F:\*\.svn\* /DEFAULT /EXCLUDE csmcmd.exe /add_rule file:///F:\*\_svn\* /DEFAULT /EXCLUDE