External Hard Drive unable to search with Spotlight

I have an external hard drive that is connected to a mac running 10.5.8, and is availble as a shared drive to all in the dept.
Until recently, we could perform Spotlight searches to find specific files, but that ability has ceased to work.
I have tried re-indexing (using the spotlight privacy dodge). I have rebooted the sytem, repaired permissions on the host computer, checked the hard drive with disk utility. All to no avail.
Please can someone suggest a possible solution to this problem.
The macs accessing the drive conatin a variety OS from 10.5 to 10.7, and none seem able to search for the files.
thanks

i tried this:
http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3865/session/L3RpbWUvMTMxMjQwOTU zMS9zaWQva25STDhFQWs%3D
then the message still popped up. So I did the following:
1. making sure the name i give my hard drive doesn't have space in it (it probably didn't matter but i was ready to do anything to make it work!)
2. empty my trash (the one on the computer, that is...)
3. make sure that any previous files from the drive isn't open
then it worked! i hope it works for you too.

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Message was edited by: lupunus / typo's fixed

External Hard Drive unable to search with Spotlight

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