Windows cannot search my external hard drive whilst it is indexing it. If I want my hard drive to be indexed on Windows, I can only search it after it has been indexed.
I don't want to remove my external hard drive from my index so I can search it. Surely there's a way to search a hard drive whilst it's being indexed.
So how can I search my external hard drive whilst it is indexing?
Des,
If you cannot wait for indexing to be completed then you could use a third-party search utility such as
NirSoft's SearchMyFiles
Denis
Last edited by Try3; 10 Oct 2020 at 22:26.
I use Swift Search at SwiftSearch download | SourceForge.net
No indexing required.
Turn off that Windows indexer! It's crap.
Interestingly SearchMyFiles claims
Windows search can do that. But you may need to know how to use it. Because all features are not exposed on a GUI, that's one reason of several people decry it, along with XP mythology persisting.SearchMyFiles allows you to make a very accurate search that cannot be done with Windows search. For Example: You can search all files created in the last 10 minutes with size between 500 and 700 bytes.
Windows search isn't really accessible for the general consumer from what I can see. Which is very limited of course!
Nirsoft Search My Files is better than Agent Ransack because it's easier to use, doesn't exclude files by and it's faster. It took 17 minutes to do a search in Search My Files that took 23 minutes in Agent Ransack. For reference this folder had 11.4GB file size and contained 73,852 files and 35,280 folders.
Also Agent Ransack excludes files from the search results by default and I checked the options tab, search query, matching criteria and software settings window, and I couldn't find out how to stop the files from being excluded. Just remember to use the*wildcard symbol when searching for file names to mean "any character" when searching for what is before or after for example *.png for png images or *pending*
Last edited by desbest; 27 Sep 2021 at 08:03.
Hi,
If you just need to locate files. Not search inside them.
I use Voidtools - Everything File search Utility
Running the same test that desbest done but I took the whole C:\ (342,520 Objects). Result are instantaneous. Indexing whole drives with large number of files takes 3-4 seconds and less.
Thanks for the update. I presume you meant seconds vs minutes in your post.
I got the opposite results as you.
1:15 sec using SearchMyFiles v3.11 vs 27 secs using Agent Ransack 2019 build 2951 to search for "pending" in C:\Windows\WinSxS. Folder is 7GB with about 70,000 Files, 142,000 Folders.
AR found both files and folders containing the search pattern while SMF only found files - I didn't bother investigating why. In AR I just typed "pending" and it wasn't excluding anything by default for me.
Strange I just tested the portable version on a brand new Win10 and 576,378 objects where indexed in less than 1 sec. and "everything" instantly filtered as I type...
Check if options are correct in Indexes / NTFS.
If you want to search drive E:\ for Win10xPE use the following syntax in the search bar.
it also support vast argumentation and a quite good advanced search.Code:"E:\" win10xpe
Searching - voidtools
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