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Certain locations are excluded from indexing in windows 7 search, by the look of things using group policies. As a simple example if I search c:\ for datemodified:12/08/2015, it doesn't find c:\windows\windowsupdate.log even though that has changed.

How can I force a search of the entire disk -- I'm specifically looking for changes made by an installer, which are quite likely to be in the excluded locations, which are unhelpfully listed as "ProgramData; Data; AppData; AppData;..." (retyped as it's not copyable, but yes, AppData is there twice).

I'd prefer not to install extra tools though I can I have to.

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  • I've managed to find it using unix find under cygwin: find /cygdrive/c -ctime -1, but I wouldn't call that an answer as it relies on extra software that I happened to have installed.
    – Chris H
    Commented Aug 12, 2015 at 9:52

2 Answers 2

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Open Folder Options > Click Search Tab > In "What to search" section chose "Always search file names and contents". Folder options

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  • That doesn't help -- I thought it might as I come across cryptically (w.r.t XP) named options before, but no. I've changed a lot of files in c:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData today and none of them show up, neither does windowsupdate.log. I know something of the modified filename but nothing of the contents, so the option as described shouldn't help. "Include system directories" is of course ticked.
    – Chris H
    Commented Aug 12, 2015 at 9:48
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In the end, with Windows ignoring some locations regardless of settings I used cygwin find /cygdrive/c -ctime -1. With no additional tools the closest I could do was from a command window: dir c:\users\*.log/s >list.txt and search the resulting text file for today's date.

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