This one is freaking stumping me, and it’s driving me nuts. I’ve been jumping back and forth between Win 7 and Win 8.1, depending on my mood and how often I feel like a clean format. I’ve gotten to a point where I’m just about OK with Win 8.1, but one thing is bothering the heck out of me:
Searching for a file across all attached hard drives.
In Win 7, I could hit the start button and the search bar was on the bottom. Type in a keyword, then search. If it came up empty or not what I was looking for, I could select “Search again in:” and select “This computer” (or “This PC” or something like that. Don’t have it open in front of me.) The important thing was - Windows would then dutifully search every single drive attached to my PC - the local hard drives, the external hard drive, the wireless connected media server.
Win 8.1 refuses to do this. Open a search, get nothing, try to search elsewhere - local drives isn’t even an option. “Files” and “Everywhere” are both a joke; they both seem to point to document folders that I don’t use or the internet. Even if I open File Explorer, select “This PC” and type something into the search prompt - Win 8.1 won’t even search it even when all the drives are visible there under “This PC”. However - if I select a particular drive, do a search from the same search prompt - well, it will search that drive, and return good results, but only from that one drive.
Anyone know how do I do a search of all drives at once in Win 8.1?
Sounds like Win8 is configured by default to searching your Users folder, email, and the web. Not sure if anything has changed since that article was written but looks like a good place to start.
Select Computer, My PC or whatever
Select “Tools” from menu bar
Select “Folder Options…”
Click on “Search” tab & review available options. One of the options I have is to include subfolders or not. Perhaps that’s not checked on your machine?
Sounds like some locations might be missing from being indexed. Go into your indexing options and check to see that all locations you want searched are included. Rebuild the index as necessary.
Everything, and I mean everything, is indexed. I can search each individual drive very quickly with good results. I still haven’t found a way to make Win 8.1 search them all.
At this point I’m kinda resigned to just waiting for Win 10 in 2 months and see if it does it better.
I have Win 8.1. When I open a file browser, it defaults to This PC, but if it doesn’t, it’s easy to click on This PC in the left (navigation) column. In the upper right corner there’s a search box, which has “Search This PC” in gray.
Is that what you’re looking for?
I rarely use it because I often have attached network drives connected to the whole company filesystems, which I sure don’t want to waste time searching.