Spotlight - No search results on my external hard drive

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I have recently upgraded to Yosemite but when I use Spotlight to search for a file spotlight does not search or include any files on my external hard drive. Can anyone else please shed some light on this annoying problem?
 
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MacInWin

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Depending on what "recently" means, it could be that Spotlight has not completed a full reindex of your system. It had to start from zero when you upgraded to Yosemite. On my MBP it took a day or so with the machine on 24/7. It runs in the background, uses the CPU and HD when nothing else is using them.
 
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Hi Jake,

Thanks for your reply. I upgraded about a month ago from 10.6. I have since discovered that Spotlight will show up search results using a Western Digital external drive but no results when I use my Seagate Back Up Plus external drive. Any thoughts?

Thanks.
 
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MacInWin

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System Preferences/Spotlight/Privacy. That lists all drives EXCLUDED form spotlight. Is the drive that is missing on that list? If so, remove it.
 
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Hi Jake,

I've tried that process numerous times but no luck. Could it be something to do with Seagate because the Western Digital drive works?
 
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MacInWin

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The reason I ask is that if the Seagate was not connected when the index was built, it may not be included in the database maintained by Spotlight. But if both are connected all the time the only thing I can think to do is to go to that same Privacy window, add or delete an entry, leave System Preferences, reboot and go back to that same place and put back what you changed. That will trigger Spotlight to do a full reindex again.

One other longshot is that Seagate drives sometimes have an energy saving function where they stop spinning to conserve energy if they are not accessed for a while. It may be that when Spotlight went to read it, the drive was not spinning and before it could spin up and report ready, Spotlight indexing moved on. I got rid of all my Seagate drives because of that feature, moved to WD and everything now works. Others have not had that problem so severely, so your mileage may vary...
 
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I just did what you suggested, rebooted, removed the drive listed but no luck. When i do a Spotlight search on Seagate, the result comes up that the Seagate drive is a folder. I open the "folder" but when i try to search for a file that I know is in the folder/drive there is no result.
 
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MacInWin

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The twelve minutes between posts was not enough time for Spotlight to reindex your system.

Are you running any "helper" or driver software from Seagate or WD? If so, you don't need it as OS X uses those drives just fine natively.
 
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Ok. Thanks. I didn't realise it needed time to index. I'll give it another shot and wait overnight.
 

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