Searching content of .dmg files

Is there any way to do a "contents" search in a .dmg file?
I have several .dmg files, made with DiskUtility , encrypted, and then opened as a virtual disk, under Devices on my MacBook Air and used to store files.
But I sometimes want to search the contents of those files. (I am doing all this when the file is open and listed under Devices)
I can't get Spotlight to search it, even when the following Apple's instructions on how to index folders or volumes, http://support.apple.com/kb/ht2409.
I also tried using direct instructions with the terminal using,
sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/volume_name
This one is particularly curious because it gives different results with different files. When I created a new test file it returned,
Air:~ DAir$ sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/test1
Password:
/Volumes/test1:
Indexing enabled.
Even so, I still could not get spotlight or search in a finder window to reliably find any content.
(sometimes if I opened, made a small alteration and then saved a file it would find content in that file, although not in any other files on the volume.)
but when I use this same command with an older volume of the same sort it always returns the result, "indexing disabled"
sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/Error12Codes
/Volumes/Error12Codes:
Indexing disabled.
It can never find any content in these older files.
Likewise, the program EasyFind will not find content on these volumes even when set to find "file contents"
Can anyone help with this? How can I search the content of a .dmg volume?

A test .dmg file that I just made does have .spotlight -V100 in it.
Still it will not find a word in the contents of a file, unless I first open that file, make a small change in it, save it, and close it. Then it seems that it has indexed that file.
In fact it would seem that when that happened it indexed all the files in that .dmg volume, and I can now find the contents of any file there.
But the .dmg files that I made earlier do not have the .spotlight-v100 in them and spotlight will not find any contents.
And still if I give the command "sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/Error12Codes" it returns
"Indexing disabled"
Putting these .dmg files into the privacy section of the Spotlight preferences and then removing them as Apple suggests, seems to have no effect.
What is going on?

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