Lion won't index external hard drive.

[ludayoda]

New mac user here. Running latest Lion (10.7.4) on a Macbook pro. I have Paragon NTFS installed, and reading/writing to NTFS volumes has worked fine. However, I am having an issue with spotlight on my external hard drive (500 gb, NTFS formatted). It simply does not work. Searching my internal main hd works fine.

I have tried several suggested solutions to this problem already. This includes adding and removing the hard drive from the privacy tab of spotlight. I also tried several terminal commands that I found online such as "sudo mdutil -E" and "sudo mdutil -i on". These all indicate that indexing on my external drive is in fact on. Spotlight does not seem to be indexing the drive. HOWEVER it does return results for folders that I have opened. Seems kind of strange. Doesn't help me much, as I am not about to open 1000's of folders and files just so they can be found through spotlight.

Any suggestions to fix this?

 

[GGJstudios]

Have you verified your permissions on that drive?

Spotlight: How to re-index folders or volumes

Note: You can only add folders or items to the Privacy tab that you have ownership permissions for. For more information about ownership and permissions, see Troubleshooting permissions issues in Mac OS X.

 

[Atius]

New mac user here. Running latest Lion (10.7.4) on a Macbook pro. I have Paragon NTFS installed, and reading/writing to NTFS volumes has worked fine. However, I am having an issue with spotlight on my external hard drive (500 gb, NTFS formatted). It simply does not work. Searching my internal main hd works fine.

I have tried several suggested solutions to this problem already. This includes adding and removing the hard drive from the privacy tab of spotlight. I also tried several terminal commands that I found online such as "sudo mdutil -E" and "sudo mdutil -i on". These all indicate that indexing on my external drive is in fact on. Spotlight does not seem to be indexing the drive. HOWEVER it does return results for folders that I have opened. Seems kind of strange. Doesn't help me much, as I am not about to open 1000's of folders and files just so they can be found through spotlight.

Any suggestions to fix this?

You can not index a NTFS drive, see this thread for more information:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/679451/

 

[GGJstudios]

You can not index a NTFS drive, see this thread for more information:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/679451/

I completely skimmed over that the drive was NTFS, despite how obvious it was. Thanks for catching that!

 

[ludayoda]

You can not index a NTFS drive, see this thread for more information:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/679451/

Haha okay that settles it then. Won't waste any more time with this. Guess I will just have to use a third party search tool. Any suggestions for a good one? Thanks for the help!

 

[lorcar]

You can not index a NTFS drive, see this thread for more information:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/679451/

this saved my day, so at least now i dont even try
What if I install Paragon or Tuxera? does it change?