My friend has a firewire drive with about 200GB of music on it, but it's formatted FAT32 and searching is slow and painful. Can I index a FAT32 drive? I'm thinking no, but thought I'd ask. Also, how do you force index a drive?
Eidorian said:FAT32 doesn't have all of the metadata storing abilities of +HFS.
Note: I said FAT32 doesn't have "all" of the metadata abilities of HFS+. You'll be able to search by filename and creation/modification data.mrichmon said:Spotlight does not rely on the metadata maintained in the HFS+ filesystem. The Spotlight indexes are maintained in directories at the root of the filesystem. FAT32 volumes can be indexed by Spotlight.
Actually it is possible to turn on full Spotlight Indexing on for a FAT32, I just tried it with a USB pen drive. I used mdutil to turn on indexing and low and behold, it worked. I checked a few word documents using "mdls" and its indexed the authors and titles of the documents, which it didn't before, so I think its working fine.Eidorian said:Note: I said FAT32 doesn't have "all" of the metadata abilities of HFS+. You'll be able to search by filename and creation/modification data.
Eidorian said:Note: I said FAT32 doesn't have "all" of the metadata abilities of HFS+. You'll be able to search by filename and creation/modification data.
I.e. the guys at Apple are smarter than we think.mrichmon said:My point was that the metadata abilities of HFS+ are not relevant to the question.
I have just created a Disk Image, partitioned the image using MBR and formatted the image using MS-DOS (FAT16). I then added a couple of PDFs files to the disk image and used "mdutil" to turn on indexing on this file system and to erase the spotlight index and thus force a reindex of the drive.
Subsequent spotlight searches when this disk image is mounted returns search hits based on the content of the PDFs. (The search was "The first 13 states" since the pdf documents were about US History.) When the image is not mounted, the spotlight searches do not return the files stored on the disk image.