Yesterday I put in a second hard drive so I could keep all of my media separate from my OS hard drive. After formatting, I tried to do a Cortana search for a specific TV show on the new drive. Searching with cortana from the task bar won't find anything on the second drive.
I did a little research and saw that you need to index the drive. I right clicked on the drive and went into properties, then I made sure I had this box checked
'Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties'
Then i went into indexing options and selected the whole new drive and let windows rebuild the index. After around 4 or 5 hours the rebuild finished and I still can't find any of my files when searching from the start menu.
I can open up file explorer and search from there fine, but that's not what I want. It's an extra step I shouldn't have to do. I could also download "Search Everything" or a similar third party search application, which is another thing I don't want to do. Searching from the start menu is ingrained in my head like typing in the home position is.
Has anyone with multiple hard drives in a single PC had this issue? Would merging the two hard drives into one partition get it working? I'd rather not do that, but if it's the only way I can search my entire PC from the taskbar I might have to.
Never had this issue with Windows 7..
Not sure how much system specs matter in this scenario, but here they are.Code:Operating System Windows 10 Home 64-bit CPU AMD FX-8300 54 °C Vishera 32nm Technology RAM 8.00GB Single-Channel DDR3 @ 802MHz (11-11-11-28) Motherboard ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. M51BC (Socket 942) 59 °C Graphics HP 23xi (1920x1080@60Hz) Acer H203H (1600x900@60Hz) 2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 (ASUStek Computer Inc) 66 °C Storage 1863GB Hitachi HUA723020ALA641 SATA Disk Device (SATA) 43 °C 931GB Seagate ST1000DM 003-1CH162 SATA Disk Device (SATA) 48 °C Optical Drives ASUS DVD RAM GH95N SATA CdRom Device DTSOFT Virtual CdRom Device Audio ASUS Xonar U3 Audio Device
Hi, it may depend on what you're searching for.
Cortana search boxes, as you know, only search what's indexed as far as files/folders are concerned.
But executables are not found(exe, bat, cmd...).
Further, you may need to click the file category(Documents, Photos, Videos... ) in Cortana's window.
I just tried this. I added aardvark.txt to a flash drive, added it to be indexed, which is was.
Typing aardvark in the search box found nothing. Clicking Documents did.
Clearly having to wait for an external drive (which could appear with a different drive letter when next it's plugged in) to be indexed before you can search it hardly makes sense.
Cortana's limitations are not encouraging me to use it at all.
Notwithstanding your distaste for 3rd party programs, when I added 'files' to Classic Shell's configurable search, simply typing aardvark into the search box found that file and a previously created test file on my internal disk whose contents were aardvark.
Rational, functional - and unlike the disaster the Win 10 menu is for start menus with subfolders, where it ignores the subfolders, and lists all shortcuts under the main folder in alpha order, resulting sometimes in (e.g.)
Help
Help
Help
in the start menu (Help from different programs) Classic Shell just works.
I should have just been using classic shell all along. Thank you for your suggestion. My main problem with 3rd party programs was that I couldn't search directly from the taskbar. Classic shell allows me to do that, and the search results are way faster and easier to access. Cortana was a huge step back.Hi, it may depend on what you're searching for.
Cortana search boxes, as you know, only search what's indexed as far as files/folders are concerned.
But executables are not found(exe, bat, cmd...).
Further, you may need to click the file category(Documents, Photos, Videos... ) in Cortana's window.
I just tried this. I added aardvark.txt to a flash drive, added it to be indexed, which is was.
Typing aardvark in the search box found nothing. Clicking Documents did.
Clearly having to wait for an external drive (which could appear with a different drive letter when next it's plugged in) to be indexed before you can search it hardly makes sense.
Cortana's limitations are not encouraging me to use it at all.
Notwithstanding your distaste for 3rd party programs, when I added 'files' to Classic Shell's configurable search, simply typing aardvark into the search box found that file and a previously created test file on my internal disk whose contents were aardvark.
Rational, functional - and unlike the disaster the Win 10 menu is for start menus with subfolders, where it ignores the subfolders, and lists all shortcuts under the main folder in alpha order, resulting sometimes in (e.g.)
Help
Help
Help
in the start menu (Help from different programs) Classic Shell just works.
