ok be gentle with me please...

I have an external hard drive which mounts correctly but I am unable to search the contents of the drive using file search. If however I use catfish I can search the files no problem, This is all on the Gnome 3 desktop by the way
If I use the xfce desktop, search for files works perfectly, what on earth am I doing wrong??
Thanks in anticipation

I am assuming you are searching with the File Manager search function.

If you have Xfce and Gnome both installed you must also have Nautilus and Thunar both installed. Thunar is the FM for Xfce but will work fine under Gnome just as Nautilus will work under Xfce. Go to your applications menu and select Thunar when using Gnome.

Nautilus, in my opinion, started on a steep downhill slide some time ago. Thunar is faster at file transfers too. Better FM. The next version of Thunar has tabbed browsing too. That was the only thing it lacked for me.

Nautilus was great up until they added the dual pane function. This is nice but they also wanted to put the tabs for some insane reason on the bottom. They got so much flack about that they put them back on top. Since then the functions have actually been dropping while performance has not increased.

All that said you should check to make sure that the package "gnome-search-tool" is installed. While this seems like something that would be installed it may not be.

If you are able to have the function you want by adding an application (catfish - generally installed under Xfce) and using a different file manager I would say it is time to admit that what you are doing wrong is using Gnome.

I say that as a Gnome user that thought he would never switch.

1 members found this post helpful.

many thanks for taking the time for such a detailed reply, and glad to report that with a bit of tweaking searching is now working under gnome.

This USB stuff is unrelated to the thread title.

Would be best to mark this as solved, delete that last post and start a new thread.

People doing a forum search for an answer to their question will never even see that there is a USB related problem.

One problem, on thread. That is the way to go on any forum.