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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 is a widely recognized expert on Windows administration, networking, and security. He has been repeatedly awarded Most Valuable Professional (MVP) status by Microsoft for his outstanding contributions in supporting users who deploy and use Microsoft platforms, products and solutions. Mitch has published over two hundred articles on different IT websites and magazines, and he has written or contributed to almost two dozen books and is lead author for the Windows 7 Resource Kit from Microsoft Press. For more information, see www.mtit.com .