Can't get search results on External Hard Drive..??

Hi guy's,
I recently bought a brand new external Acomdata 160 gig Firewire hard drive in order to back up all my important stuff off of my G4 1ghz iMac due to Kernel Panics and a couple of other frustrating issues.
I loaded the external hard drive, did an erase and install from the OS X dvd and so far, most is ok EXCEPT that I don't get any results when searching through Spotlight, Command+F, Search windows - from my external hard drive.
Does it need to be indexed? If it does, I haven't been able to find how.
I notice the external hard drive is frequently running more so than when it was a few days old. It makes a lot of "snap, crackle, pop" noises as the hard drive spins and processes.
Everything I put on it is still there and I can manually locate files but it's 75 gigs worth of stuff and I'd much rather be able to automate the search.
Spotlight/search does produce results for my iMacs hard drive, just not the external hard drive.
Any help?
Thanks guys.
vanessa_b

There is a pulsing, reddish dot in the middle of the
blue light but on the hard drive itself, I don't see
any "lights" in any "menu bar".
It's at blue circle with a white Q-shaped symbol at the right end of your menu bar.
If you dare to use the terminal application (can be found in the utilities folder) you can use the following command to re-index that drive. Start Terminal and type (or paste) the following line and hit enter:
sudo mdutil -E "/Volumes/xxx/"
Replace "xxx" with the name of Your drive! If there is a space in that name type it like "/Volumes/My\ Drive/"! You will be prompted for Your admin password to proceed.

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