Spotlight not finding results on external hard drive

[Gravydog316]

Hi, so my mom reinstalled macOS Ventura 13.5 on our iMac,
Finder & Spotlight are returning search results on our iMac hard drive,
but now are not returning any search results on our external hard drive,
even though it was before the re-installation...

I tried adding & removing both the iMac HD & ext. HD from Settings as suggested, but still no results on the ext. HD, only the iMac HD...

===
& i keep removing the Mac HD, but it keeps quickly re-adding itself.
Why does it do this?

 

[Slartibart]

Connect the external drive (btw. what file system does it use?).
Then use ⌘ + ⇧ + . to show hidden files (the period is part of the keyboard shortcut) in the finder.
Look for a folder named /.Spotlight-V100 on the drive. Drag it to the trash and empty it. Restart. (If you can not empty it, restart first, empty the trash, and restart a second time.)

Otherwise I recommend installing Onyx, run it and use it - besides other things - to reset the Spotlight indices.

 

[Gravydog316]

Connect the external drive (btw. what file system does it use?).
Then use ⌘ + ⇧ + . to show hidden files (the period is part of the keyboard shortcut) in the finder.
Look for a folder named /.Spotlight-V100 on the drive. Drag it to the trash and empty it. Restart. (If you can not empty it, restart first, empty the trash, and restart a second time.)

Otherwise I recommend installing Onyx, run it and use it - besides other things - to reset the Spotlight indices.

it's "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" & a GUID partition map ...ok i did that & restarted. goign to work & will let it rebuild (how do you tell if Spotlight is indexing?)

 

[rpmurray]

(how do you tell if Spotlight is indexing?)

Click the Spotlight icon in the menu bar, enter a keyword to search, and you will find a progress bar indicating if Spotlight is indexing.

 

[gilby101]

(how do you tell if Spotlight is indexing?)

1) Terminal command `mdutil -sav` (or just `mdutil -sa`) to get the indexing status of each drive.

2) Activity Monitor will show active mds, mds_stores, and multiple mdworker processes when spotlight is indexing.