Windows 8: Search entire computer?

windows-8 windows-search

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Go to the Desktop, open File Explorer. Navigate to the root of the hard drive in question. Type in "cookies.sqlite" in the search box (upper right of window, just below the ribbon). This should search the entire drive.

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Stefan Lasiewski

Stefan Lasiewski Daddy, Linux Guy, Bicyclist, Tinkerer, Fixer & Breaker of things. I work as a Senior SYstem Engineer at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in Berkeley, CA. Father of 3 cute children. Yes I'm a sysadmin and a parent. Heavy user of CentOS, RHEL & FreeBSD for production services at work. I also run Ubuntu at home, for the simplicity. I'm a fan of Apache HTTP Server, Nagios & Cacti. Original proposer of unix.stackexchange.com (Yes, this proposal predated askubuntu.com, and I wish they would have merged with the Unix proposal.).

Updated on September 18, 2022

Comments

Stefan Lasiewski almost 2 years

I am running Windows 8.

I would like to search the entire harddrive for a file named cookies.sqlite. I am searching for files which belong to a missing Firefox profile.

If I open the Charms Bar, select "Search", select "Files" and search for cookies.sqlite, then Windows says "No files match your search". Yet, I can browse to %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ and see the file cookies.sqlite. The file exists, but Windows search isn't finding it.

How can I use Windows to search for a file on my computer?
- HackToHell over 11 years
  
  Try using Everything - voidtools.com
- Ofiris over 11 years
  
  What if you open Computer and search from the Search text box there ?
- Stefan Lasiewski over 11 years
  
  @Ofiris : That works. K.A. also suggested it in the answer below.
- WernerCD about 9 years
  
  I think I might like that Everything... much faster when searching specifically for a file by name than I expected it to be. Thanks @HackToHell