Windows Search in Windows 7

Welcome to SF Melissa!

Please check out this post and especially first link in it.

For external hard drivers I would use some 3rd party search tools like XSearch - Search files on your computer
It does not have indexing. And since it is a good old classic, it shouldn't let you down.

Hi Melissa, welcome to the Seven Forums.

Please give us some more information, an example what you are searching for instance pictures from last holiuday on external drive E: or a video you know you have it but do not know on which drive called Party.

Kari

It looks you have some issues with your E: drive. Before getting to your search issue we need to solve it.

Please tell is this E: drive an internal hard drive or external?

Kari

OK, thank you.

Occasionally these read / write issues with an external drive can be caused by a problematic connection, malfunctioning USB port or cable. However, mostly it is because of a hardware failure. My recommendation for that would be to backup all data located on that drive, format it and try again. If it still gives the same error message, I would use the drive as shotgun practice target and buy a new one.

Back to your search issue. Could you please do a test and tell us how it went? If it's OK for you, here's what I would like you to do. It looks complicated but it really is a simple test, you'll manage it without problems:

• Create a new folder on both E: and F:. The name of the folder is not important, you can leave them having the default New Folder name
• Open Notepad, type thisisatest ("this is a test" written without spaces, we need a text string that is most probably not found on your PC)
• Save this file with name SearchTest on both of your newly created folders, E:\New Folder and F:\New folder
• Open Windows Explorer in Computer view showing all your drives:
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• Type ext:txt content:thisisatest (exactly as written here!)on search field (highlighted in above screenshot) and hit Enter (ext:txt means search is looking for files with extension txt, which is the default Notepad extension, and content:thisisatest means search should only look for those txt files that contain a text string thisisatest)
• Tell us if your search found both SearchTest files, the one on E: and one on F:
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This test tells us if your non-indexed location search is working as it should, and if your search is also set to search file content. Let's go further after this simple test.

Kari

I might be way off base but this is what I do.
1. Windows Explorer and on the left side select the drive you want to search and tick on it.
2. In the upper right hand Search type in you search (in my case ins).
3. Select Computer, Enter. If it's not indexed it will inform you but still do the search.