No Spotlight on NTFS?

[bay2sacto]

Sorry if this is a newbie ish question...Am I correct, that Spotlight doesn't index NTFS formatted volumes? I have a 1tb external with about 700gb full of apps, media and other data I'd like to be able to search. Am I out of luck?

Thanks -- Kevin

 

[robbieduncan]

Spotlight relies on getting filesystem update notifications to know what and where to index. NTFS does not generate these so Spotlight will not index NTFS drives (or anything other than HFS+ I think).

 

[BornAgainMac]

If you go to the terminal, you will see a hidden directory called .Spotlight-V100 for the index for each drive.

$ cd /Volumes/[Your Drive]
$ ls -la
...
.Spotlight-V100
..

Mac OS X can't write to NTFS. I didn't know about the filesystem update notifications. Haven't tried a FAT-32 filesystem but it sounds logical.

 

[old-wiz]

If
..

Mac OS X can't write to NTFS. I didn't know about the filesystem update notifications. Haven't tried a FAT-32 filesystem but it sounds logical.

Add-ons are available so that OSx can write to NTFS. However, I don't know if this will help wth spotlight.

 

[Tallest Skil]

Add-ons are available so that OSx can write to NTFS. However, I don't know if this will help wth spotlight.

It doesn't; trust me. 🙁

 

[yudilks]

You need to force it to index

I found the answer here

Make sure your Mac can write to NTFS, then do this command:

Type in Terminal:

sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/yourdrivename

or

sudo mdutil -i on "/Volumes/your drive name"

This should do the trick just fine...

Ouh, BTW, your drive name here must be change with an actual name of your drive OK...

 

[Dennis Huiberts]

Download this and this and you're done! The only downside is that it's not blazing fast writing and copying files from the disk and you have to safely remove the drive each time. If you don't data can be corrupted...