
This is sometimes helpful if Spotlight seems to be having a problem: add the troubled drive to Privacy, then remove it. If you remove something from the Privacy pane Spotlight will fire up and create a new index.


While this takes longer than if the drive were indexed, if I confine my search to a particular folder it is reasonably fast-even searching the whole drive for a particular file name isn't too bad, less than a minute (with a drive that's indexed it is instantaneous). The result is that Spotlight does not index the drive, but it will perform a "brute force" search-runs thru all the files looking for a match. What I did was go in and edit the Spotlight configuration file. When Apple says Privacy, they really mean privacy! I have one drive which I don't want indexed, but I do want to be able to search it occasionally. If something is in Privacy, not only doesn't Spotlight look at any index, it won't search the drive AT ALL.
