Registering a New Hard Drive with Windows 7’s Search
Windows Search regularly checks all registered hard drives on your computer indexing their contents. This is an automatic function but if you add an external hard drive or partition a hard drive, you need to register it with Windows 7. Once you do this, you can allow Windows 7 to index its contents.
Let us look at how to register a newly partitioned hard drive, Drive D.
- Click the Start button.
- In the Search box, type “indexing options“.
- When Search opens, select “Indexing Options”.
Search Result
- This opens the Indexing Options dialog box. In the section labelled, Included Locations, the new partition, Drive D is not on the list.
Indexing Options
- Select the Modify button.
Modify button
- The Indexed locations dialog box opens. In the top section, labelled Change selected locations, is a list of checked locations. Note that Drive (D:) is not checked meaning it is not indexed.
Indexed Locations window
- To register the new drive for indexing, check its box.
Checking new drive
- Click the Ok button. Drive D is now on the list registered. Note it is now on the lower list, Summary of selected locations.
New Drive registered
- Click the Ok button.
- The Indexing Options window re-opens displaying the missing drive in the registered list.
Drive now listed!
- Click the Close button.
- The Indexing Options dialog box reappears showing Drive D as one of the Indexed Locations. Windows 7 registers the new drive and begins indexing. This may take some time.
Indexing in progress
- To complete the task click the Close button.
Keep this in mind! Just as you can add new drives to your computer system and index them, you can easily exclude them from the index. If you want to find out how to remove a hard drive or a folder from Search’s Index, check out my post “Excluding a Drive or a Folder from Windows 7’s Search”.
Also remember that indexing does take a lot of time dependent on the volume of information that is on the drive.
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