Add a second hard drive to Windows Vista search index

Posted on September 14, 2008 at 5:48 am

The new search capabilities in Windows Vista are certainly a significant step up from those in Windows 2000 and Windows XP. For once, you can actually find what you are looking for in a reasonable amount of time.

By default, however, the new Windows Search feature only indexes the partition where the OS is installed, usually the C drive. This is fine, unless you have a second partition or second hard drive to store your data files. In that case, you have to manually add that second hard drive to the search index, but it’s a two step process.

Step 1: Turn on search indexing for the second hard drive/partition

In My Computer, right-click on the drive and choose Properties. Check the box that says “Index this drive for faster searching” and click OK.

For some strange reason, this does not actually add the drive to the indexer, so you have to perform one more step.

Step 2: Add drive to Indexing Options

Now go to the Control Panel and click on Indexing Options. In the dialog box, you’ll see a list of current locations that are indexed by the Indexing service. Click the Modify button and check off the second partition or hard drive that you want indexed, i.e. D:, E:, etc.

If you do not see the drive you are looking for, make sure to press the Show all locations button at the bottom of the dialog. You should then see all of the possible choices:

That’s it. Windows will begin indexing the new location and results from those extra drives should now appear in your searches. In this way, you can also add network drives to the Windows search index as long as the drive is a mapped drive. Note that turning on indexing in Windows is a great way to find files quickly and I would suggest you keep it on in Vista, however, you may want to turn off indexing in XP to increase computer performance.

You have also be interested in third party programs that can you find files quickly in Windows, such as Super Finder or Google Desktop search.

Also, read this post if you are getting the error “Windows Search Indexer stopped working and was closed“, it’s an annoying error that can happen sometimes in Vista.

» Filed Under Windows Vista

Comments

3 Responses to “Add a second hard drive to Windows Vista search index”

Madhur Kapoor said on : September 15th, 2008 at 4:29 am

Thanks Aseem. I guess i will have to add my other partitions for indexing

matt said on : April 27th, 2009 at 8:43 pm

Thanks for the post, I was having trouble figuring this out for windows 7.

bob said on : August 9th, 2009 at 12:13 am

Ok this is cool, and I appreciate you showing it to us. Their are still two really big problems with Vista’s search.

1. Mistypes tend to not show up. So me typing virtualbox vs virtual box. One launches Virtual Box the other doesn’t. To me this isn’t good enough.

2. There is no right click and search. Before if I wanted to find all of the text files in a specific folder it was right click search and then *.txt Now I can’t do it at all