guys, i have a question re spotlight. A lot of people say that it is way better than the windows search function. I can appreciate that it starts to look for files the second I start typing. However, i tried to search for a certain word document whose file name I forgot and so I just typed a uncommon word which is unique to the just a few word documents in my ext. hard disk. However, my search ended up with nothing. does this trick work with spotlight. I got used to this way of searching with Windows search kasi since my document folders are so disarranged (my fault). i tinkered with the settings of spotlight and saw that the choices available was with which types of files spotlight first searches or prioritezes. Sadly, I ended up using windows in bootcamp to search for the file and finally found it.
I wonder why. My Spotlight always works flawlessly. My files are all haphazard towards the end of the month, and I often have to do a mega-Spotlight night just to get them all in order in time for my reports. Often, my file names don't make sense, so I also enter a word that I know is peculiar to the file, and it works all the time. Let me look it up. There could be issues.
I've found a couple of discussions that could be helpful. http://www.philmug.ph/forum/showthread.php?t=9962 http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=176723
How is the external formatted? If it is in NTFS, OSX (and by extension, Spotlight) will be unable to write a search index file to the partition. No index file, no searching.
