How to Search Files on All Drives on Windows

Most people have files spread across multiple drives. Your C: drive has the operating system and program files. Your D: drive might hold documents, photos, or games. An external hard drive stores backups or old projects. But when you need to find a specific file, Windows makes you search each drive separately.

Windows Search only indexes your user folders on C: by default. If the file you need is on another drive, it will not show up. Here are three ways to search across all your drives at once.

Method 1: File Explorer (This PC)

File Explorer can search across all drives, but you need to start from the right place.

Steps:

1. Open File Explorer (press Win+E)
2. Click This PC in the left sidebar
3. Type your search term in the search box (top right)
4. Wait for results

When you search from This PC, File Explorer scans every connected drive: C:, D:, external hard drives, USB sticks, everything. The problem is speed. File Explorer does not use an index when searching non-indexed locations. It reads every file and folder in real time, which means searching across multiple drives can take several minutes or longer depending on how many files you have.

You can narrow results using search filters. Click the Search tab and filter by date modified, file size, or file type. You can also type filters directly:

kind:document date:this week
size:>10MB ext:.pdf
name:invoice

Limitations:

• Very slow on large drives (no index for non-default locations)
• Only searches filenames unless content indexing is enabled per drive
• External drives are scanned from scratch every time
• Search often freezes or shows incomplete results

Method 2: Everything (Instant Filename Search)

Everything by voidtools is a free tool that indexes every filename on all your NTFS drives in seconds. It is the fastest way to find a file by name on Windows. (See also our roundup of Everything alternatives.)

Steps:

1. Download and install Everything
2. Open the app. It automatically indexes all NTFS drives
3. Start typing a filename. Results appear instantly

Everything reads the NTFS Master File Table (MFT) directly, which is why it can index millions of files in under a second. You can search by filename, extension, path, or use filters like folders, wildcards, and regex.

If you have non-NTFS drives (like a FAT32 USB stick or exFAT external drive), Everything can still index them using a folder index, but it will be slower than NTFS indexing.

Limitations:

• Only searches filenames and paths, not file contents
• Cannot find a file if you only remember what was inside it
• Non-NTFS drives require manual folder indexing
• No content preview or semantic search

Method 3: FileScope — Search All Drives by Name, Content, or Meaning

Everything finds files by name. File Explorer is slow and unreliable. Neither of them can find a file when you remember what was inside it but not what you named it.

FileScope scans all your drives and reads the contents of every supported file. Then it lets you search by filename, content, or meaning from a single search bar.

Steps:

1. Download and install FileScope
2. Choose which folders to scan
3. Press Ctrl+Space anywhere on your desktop
4. Describe what you are looking for
5. Open the file directly from the results

FileScope scans all connected drives automatically. It reads inside PDFs, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, text files, code files, and even extracts text from images using OCR. Once scanned, searches are instant.

For example, if you saved a tax document somewhere on your D: drive last year but cannot remember the filename, you can search for:

"2025 tax return"

FileScope will find every file across all your drives that contains or relates to that topic, regardless of the filename or which drive it is on.

Why This Matters for Multi-Drive Setups

If you have files on C:, D:, and an external drive, you probably do not remember which drive has which file. FileScope removes that friction entirely. You do not need to know where the file is. You just need to know what is in it.

Everything runs locally on your PC. No cloud, no accounts, no data leaving your computer.

Comparison

What About Expanding the Windows Search Index?

You can tell Windows to index additional drives. Go to Settings > Search > Searching Windows and switch from Classic to Enhanced mode. This tells Windows to index all drives instead of just your user folders.

There are a few caveats:

• The initial index build can take hours or even days on large drives
• It uses significant CPU and disk resources while indexing
• External drives that are not always connected will have stale or missing indexes
• Content indexing (searching inside files) is limited to certain file types and must be enabled per extension
• Windows Search still only matches exact keywords, not meaning

Enhanced mode is a partial fix. It makes Windows Search cover more locations, but it does not solve the core problems of speed and accuracy.

Conclusion

If you just need to find a file by name across all drives, Everything is the fastest free option. If you need to search inside files or find something when you only remember what the file was about, FileScope covers all drives and all file types from a single search bar.

File Explorer works in a pinch, but waiting several minutes for results every time is not a real solution when you have files spread across multiple drives.