External HD won't show up in Spotlight or Reindex

[makPNO]

I've been having trouble getting spotlight to index a new WD Passport external hard drive in OSX 10.6.

As far as I am aware, spotlight never actually indexed it in the first place. I am unable to find anything through spotlight on it. I attempted multiple times to force reindex it by adding it to spotlight's privacy list in system preferences, and then taking it out, but nothing happens. Additionally, I have tried the "sudo mdutil -E" command in terminal to force a reindex, but I just get the message.
/Volumes/(my external HD):
No index.

I don't know what to do at this point to get the disk to index, I've already repaired permissions in disk utility. The format is Mac OS extended (journaled)

Any help is really appreciated!

(also, I don't know if this might help, but I do have a time machine backup on the drive within the same partition that I use to store other files)

 

[frozencarbonite]

Have you tried this?

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2409

 

[wrldwzrd89]

I've been having trouble getting spotlight to index a new WD Passport external hard drive in OSX 10.6.

As far as I am aware, spotlight never actually indexed it in the first place. I am unable to find anything through spotlight on it. I attempted multiple times to force reindex it by adding it to spotlight's privacy list in system preferences, and then taking it out, but nothing happens. Additionally, I have tried the "sudo mdutil -E" command in terminal to force a reindex, but I just get the message.
/Volumes/(my external HD):
No index.

I don't know what to do at this point to get the disk to index, I've already repaired permissions in disk utility. The format is Mac OS extended (journaled)

Any help is really appreciated!

(also, I don't know if this might help, but I do have a time machine backup on the drive within the same partition that I use to store other files)

Spotlight won't index Time Machine backups. The problem here is that you are trying to do something that is not recommended - mixing Time Machine backups with other files on the same drive / partition.