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        Indexing a Second Hard Drive on Vista

Section(s): Search
Published on Aug 05, 2008.
Last Modified on Aug 05, 2008.
Last Modified by Mitch Tulloch.
Rated 4 out of 5 based on 2 votes.

Making sure a second hard drive is indexed in Vista requires two settings.

Say you add a second hard drive to your Vista computer and it shows up as D: drive in Windows Explorer. Now you move lots of your data files to this second drive—how can you make sure your second drive is being indexed so that you can quickly search its contents?

You need to do two things:

Right-click on D: drive in Windows Explorer and select Properties, then select the checkbox that says “Index this drive for faster searching.” This sets the FANCI bit on drive D: so that it can be indexed, but it doesn’t actually add drive D: to your indexer, so go to step 2 to do that now.,
Open Indexing Options from Control Panel, click the Modify button, and select the checkbox for drive D: and now the Windows Search service will begin indexing the content on drive D: so that you can search for files and for text within files on that drive.

About Mitch Tulloch

Mitch Tulloch was lead author for the Windows Vista Resource Kit from Microsoft Press, which is the book for IT pros who want to deploy, maintain and support Windows Vista in mid- and large-sized network environments. Mitch was also the author of Introducing Windows Server 2008 and technical project lead for the Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Resource Kit, both books also from Microsoft Press. For more information on these and other books by Mitch, see www.mtit.com .