Spotlight doesnt' index

On both my old iBook and my new iMac, Spotlight doesn't work on the HDs (but works on any connected USB drive), Google Desktop doesn't work either ("no indexing"). Putting/deleting the HDs in the privacy part of Spotlight Preferences doesn't change anything...
Cocktail <http://cocktail.en.softonic.com/mac> says "unable to detect Spotlight indexing status. iBook is not accessible, read-only or mdutil (/usr/bin/mdutil) is not working properly."
Is there any Terminal lines of code that could explore/change Spotlight behaviour? I tried "mdutil -pEsa [-i on] volume /" without any success...

I just happen to find a solution: Spotlight is currently indexing my HD!
Here is the solution
<http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7063635> :
I have tried most of the recommendations here - and finally even reinstalled and rolled back my entire PB from Time Machine this night - but Spotlight did not work. Got message in terminal "Indexing and searching disabled".
Solution found on web - below with 2 elements:
1) Need to remove files that block for indexing
2) Turn on indexing - Thanks to Patrick Kinsella
1) Check your root directory for a file called ".metadataneverindex"
If it's there, delete it.
You can only find it after making invisible files visible (se below)
2) These great hints won’t work if Spotlight is completely disabled (which some people have tried and don’t know how to reverse). If all else fails, follow this procedure:
Make hidden files visible (copy and paste the next line into Terminal:"defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool YES" [or use Onyx or alikes]
!!!You need to know that the visible/invisible switch works only after a relaunch of Finder (via Command-Alt-Esc).
Now in (previously hidden) /etc folder in your root/hard drive, find "hostconfig~", and open it with any text editor. Does it include this line:"SPOTLIGHT=-YES-" (note the two dashes astride YES)? If not, type this line at the bottom. Save the file as "hostconfig~" in your root folder (etc folder won’t accept it from a text editor). Now drag and drop this new hostconfig to /etc. This requires your admin password to replace the existing "hostconfig~".
Reboot, and your spotlight is working. This may be a long way around, but it worked for me.
Now make invisibles invisible again with this line in Terminal: "defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool NO" [or use Onyx or alikes]
To fire up Spotlight, you may need to type this into Terminal: "sudo mdutil -i on /" (the slash is important)
If Mail is still not searching inside Entire Message, type this into Terminal to index your old messages:"sudo mdimport /users/YOURNAME/library/mail [or whatever the path to your mailbox message folders]".
The combination of these two did the trick for me.
--------------------

Similar Messages

  • Spotlight not indexing after hard drive replaced

    Hi all
    Just wondering if anyone knows how to encourage Spotlight to re-index? Just had my hard drive replaced as part of the recall, and now Spotlight wont index anything.
    I've tried previous suggestions (adding and removing hard drive to privacy list, commands through terminal etc), but it's still not working.  All the software is up to date (10.7.5).
    Any ideas?  It's incredibly annoying, and making working on this computer virtually impossible at the moment.
    Cheers

    If you have more than one user account, these instructions must be carried out as an administrator.
    Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:
    ☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
    ☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
    ☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Console in the icon grid.
    Step 1
    Make sure the title of the Console window is All Messages. If it isn't, select All Messages from the SYSTEM LOG QUERIES menu on the left.
    Enter "mdworker" (without the quotes) in the Filter text field. Post the most recent 50 or so messages that appear in the Console window — the text, please, not a screenshot.
    If there are runs of repeated messages, post only one example of each. Don't post many repetitions of the same message.
    When posting a log extract, be selective. Don't post more than is requested.
    Please do not indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into a message.
    Some personal information, such as the names of your files, may be included — edit that out, too, but don’t remove the context.
    Step 2
    Do the same with the search string "mds".

  • Force Spotlight to Index a FW HDD

    Hello!
    Well, I recently aquired (as in 2 days ago) a Seagate 400GB FireWire/USB drive. I have it connected via FW.
    Well, after formatting it to Mac Extended format, I partitioned it for a 60G section (intended for a secondary boot volume) and a 320 GB volume.
    Yesterday, I coppied all 6 gig of data from our old G4's hard drive. Tonight, I want to look for a couple of files - but spotlight hasn't indexed anything - so not even find will find the files.
    How do you force spotlight to index a hard drive?
    -Dan

    To force a volume to index just drag it into the privacy window for a moment and then drag it out.
    -mj
    [email protected]

  • Spotlight still indexing after upgrading to 10.6.7

    I upgraded my 3-1/2 year old black MacBook to OS X 10.6.7 the other day, and after I rebooted, Spotlight began indexing my drive and has been stuck at "Estimating index time" ever since.
    Is this a known issue, or am I the only one?
    I'm not sure why it started indexing again, but how can I get it to stop?

    Hi,
    Try to stop NAT, than start Setup Gateway Assistant again, may be help.
    Note: you should be sure your firewall is in correct setup. My NAT some time stop and can not start again because of my firewall "open" much ports than nessesary.

  • How can I stop Spotlight from indexing external drives?

    I work in an environment where we plugin several different costumer harddrives all day long as part of our working process. Often only to extract one file from a given drive. Therefore its annoying that Spotlight automatically starts indexing these drives, because it slows down everthing, but also because our windows costumers suddenly see these weird mac files on their drives, that are invisible to the macuser. The Privacy setting is not of much use, as its impossible to add oru costumers drives to the list - we simply don't know the drive until we see it.
    How can spotlight stop indexing?

    The Privacy option is okay for private users, but at work we receive alot of harddrives from costumers and we simply cannot spend the extra time waiting for a drive to be indexed every time it is connected. That drive may never be connected again as it belongs to a costumer, and it is impossible for us to add drives to the Privacy pane, because we do not know they exist before we see them infront of us. The ption to disable all external drives from being indexed would be great. Or that the indexing can be stopped in the spotlight menu, or that the indexing will not start until 10 minutes after the drive has been mounted - and only if the drive is inactive.

  • Stop Spotlight from indexing new drives

    I know how to block a drive in Spotlight's privacy settings.
    What I'm looking for is a way to stop Spotlight from indexing a drive every time I plug one in.  I'm often connecting external drives for work & spotlight immediatley starts to index & I go in and add it to the blocked list in Spotlight> Privacy.
    Is there a way to just have Spotlight NOT try to index a new drive?

    Sorry, I missed that part.
    Try this, add this file to the external drive.
    touch /Volumes/name of the external drive/.metadata_never_index
    This will add a file called .metadata_never_index to the root of that drive.
    You can also disable spotlight
    sudo mdutil -a -i off
    To re-enable Spotlight:
    sudo mdutil -a -i on

  • How to stop Spotlight from indexing backup drives

    Is there any way to stop Spotlight from indexing backup drives?
    Thanks

    Yes, in Spotlight preferences there is an option to do this. I'm not on my Mac now, so I forget exactly where in Spotlight preferences it is. I believe there is a second tab that you have to click on, then click the "+" sign to add items to Exclude. Just add your backup drive.

  • IPhoto/Spotlight not indexing SOLUTION

    For those iPhoto 6 users whoose comments and keywords not being indexed by Spotlight, here is the solution to your problem!
    If you are getting * Parsing file: '~/Pictures/iPhoto Library/AlbumData.xml'
    ERROR: syntax error (<key>PhotoCount</key>) when you try to manually index your iPhoto library with mdimport, this will solve your problem!
    You can only have single-line comments on your photos:
    - Create a smart album: "Comments... contains... [option][return]"
    Note: press option+return with your keyboard... the box will appear blank
    - The smart album should become populated with photos where you entered a comment containing a character return
    - Click the ( i ) in the bottom left-hand corner to draw up the info for each file, and manually remove the character break until your smart alum is empty OR go to Photos -> Batch Change and enter a new comment. Make sure that "append" is UNCHECKED -- This will overwrite all of the comments.
    Now, you must also make sure you only have single-line comments on your rolls:
    - From the iPhoto Library, go to View -> Sort Photos -> By Film Roll
    - Hold the Apple (command) key, and click the drop down triangle once or twice (until all are collapsed)
    - Manually examine each roll and make sure that the comments (if any) are all on one line.
    Note: If the comments are all on one line, the whole line will be visible in the collapsed view under the Film Roll name
    Quit iPhoto
    Open Terminal (in the Utilities folder)
    - Type mdimport -f ~/Pictures and hit return
    - After some time, a message should come up saying:
    * Parsing file: '~/Pictures/iPhoto Library/AlbumData.xml'
    As long as there is not an error message underneath, this is good!
    - When the command has finished running and you're at a blank prompt again, quit Terminal
    Open iPhoto
    - Click iPhoto in the menu bar, and go to Preferences
    - Click the Keywords tab
    - Click the "+" and create a new keyword called Spotlight
    - Close out of iPhoto preferences
    - From the iPhoto Library, select all of the photos (Edit -> Select All)
    - Get info on the files (Photos -> Get Info)
    - Select the Keywords tab
    - CHECK the box that says [Spotlight] *THIS MIGHT TAKE A WHILE
    - UNCHECK the box that says [Spotlight] * THIS MIGHT TAKE A WHILE
    Note: This forces all of the pictures to be updated in the database
    - Quit iPhoto
    Search for your comments and keywords with Spotlight

    Can I ask, does this need to be done every time you add photos to iPhoto, or is this a one-off trick to get Spotlight to look at iPhoto keywords in the first place?
    My first experience with iPhoto is iPhoto6 so I don't have any baggage that I am bringing from earlier copies of iPhoto. I've imported in 1500 photos and am working my way through tagging them with keywords and am hoping that spotlight will index them. Is this bug related to keywords applied in older versions of iPhoto, or does the issue manifest itself even on a brand new library? Are Apple looking to patch iPhoto / Spotlight to resolve this?
    Thanks.
    Graham

  • IPhoto/Spotlight not indexing SOLUTION *edit

    For those iPhoto 6 users whoose comments and keywords not being indexed by Spotlight, here is the solution to your problem!
    If you are getting * Parsing file: '~/Pictures/iPhoto Library/AlbumData.xml'
    ERROR: syntax error (<key>PhotoCount</key>) when you try to manually index your iPhoto library with mdimport, this will solve your problem!
    You can only have single-line comments on your photos:
    - Create a smart album: "Comments... contains... [option][return]"
    Note: press option+return with your keyboard... the box will appear blank
    - The smart album should become populated with photos where you entered a comment containing a character return
    - Click the ( i ) in the bottom left-hand corner to draw up the info for each file, and manually remove the character break until your smart alum is empty OR go to Photos -> Batch Change and enter a new comment. Make sure that "append" is UNCHECKED -- This will overwrite all of the comments.
    Now, you must also make sure you only have single-line comments on your rolls:
    - From the iPhoto Library, go to View -> Sort Photos -> By Film Roll
    - Hold the Apple (command) key, and click the drop down triangle once or twice (until all are collapsed)
    - Manually examine each roll and make sure that the comments (if any) are all on one line.
    Note: If the comments are all on one line, the whole line will be visible in the collapsed view under the Film Roll name
    Quit iPhoto
    Open Terminal (in the Utilities folder)
    - Type mdimport -f ~/Pictures and hit return
    - After some time, a message should come up saying:
    * Parsing file: '~/Pictures/iPhoto Library/AlbumData.xml'
    As long as there is not an error message underneath, this is good!
    - When the command has finished running and you're at a blank prompt again, quit Terminal
    Open iPhoto
    - Click iPhoto in the menu bar, and go to Preferences
    - Click the Keywords tab
    - Click the "+" and create a new keyword called Spotlight
    - Close out of iPhoto preferences
    - From the iPhoto Library, select all of the photos (Edit -> Select All)
    - Get info on the files (Photos -> Get Info)
    - Select the Keywords tab
    - CHECK the box that says [Spotlight] *THIS MIGHT TAKE A WHILE
    - UNCHECK the box that says [Spotlight] * THIS MIGHT TAKE A WHILE
    Note: This forces all of the pictures to be updated in the database
    - Quit iPhoto
    Search for your comments and keywords with Spotlight

    Can I ask, does this need to be done every time you add photos to iPhoto, or is this a one-off trick to get Spotlight to look at iPhoto keywords in the first place?
    My first experience with iPhoto is iPhoto6 so I don't have any baggage that I am bringing from earlier copies of iPhoto. I've imported in 1500 photos and am working my way through tagging them with keywords and am hoping that spotlight will index them. Is this bug related to keywords applied in older versions of iPhoto, or does the issue manifest itself even on a brand new library? Are Apple looking to patch iPhoto / Spotlight to resolve this?
    Thanks.
    Graham

  • Spotlight is indexing but what? And why does it want access to the web?

    I can see Spotlight is indexing, it spends several hours a day doing this, every day.
    Where can i find more details like previous OS X versions? Which drive, how much time left etc.
    Console was no help, any suggestions welcome.
    Also, with "Spotlight Suggestions" and "Bing Web Searches" disabled in the Spotlight Search Results references, why is the process "Spotlight Web Content" still trying to access the web several times a day? I am not using Spotlight when this happens nor am i trying to preview any files that have web content in them. Most commonly it tries to connect to static.amazon.com on the http port.

    In System Preferences > Spotlight > Search Results, if you have "Bookmarks and History" checked, then the "Spotlight Web Content" background process will crawl any web page that you recently visited to index its keywords. Uncheck that to turn it off.

  • Convincing spotlight to index other file types

    I have a large number of LaTeX documents on my computer, but Spotlight seems unwilling to index them. How can I convince spotlight to go ahead and index/search files with a .tex extension just like it would any other ASCII text file?
    Details: LaTeX source code is standard ASCII text, but the files have a ".tex" extension. These files never seem to show up in Spotlight searches, even if I search for terms that I'm certain are included. I'm guessing that Spotlight sees the extension, says "I don't know how to index files of this type" and moves on. How can I tell it to index (and then subsequently search) these files just like normal .txt files? (I'd probably like to do the same with other "source code" file extensions too...) Thanks!

    I found that Spotlight would index thousands of my old LaTeX files if I dragged them to another location and then dragged them back again. Unfortunately, I found that just moving the folders they were in was not sufficient.
    This move added the metadata "public.plain-text" to all the .tex files, even though, since OS X 10.4, cp amd mv is supposed to preserving metadata and forks (according the man pages of CpMac and MvMac).
    I did this after I had modified TeXShop's Info.plist by adding the public.plain-text string to the UTTypeConformsTo key. This is described in the Link: [macosxhints: Add Quick Look support for certain file formats|http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20071028184428583] and by Tristan Hubsch in the Link: [Apple Discussion Topic: How to Spotlight (and QuickView) Hidden and Programming Files?|http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6880380]. I don't know if this is necessary for the change.

  • Get Spotlight to index a NAS disk?

    Is it possible to get Spotlight to index a NAS disk? (Or should it do this normally but it's not working properly?).
    I have a NAS disk permanently connected to my Mac (LaCie Ethernet Disk Mini) & every time I do a search on there it will churn away searching but not return any results.
    Actually it seems like it might be a bug because as well as not returning any results once I've closed the Finder window it will still continue churning away searching (I can hear the disk activity).
    It will continue until I reboot the computer.

    OK, the Terminal is a the way that you access UNIX shell commands (the Mac command line interface). Instead of clicking on things you have to type the actual command into the "prompt" hit return, and then the shell executes the command. So you go to the Utilities folder and double click Terminal to launch it. Exactly what you see when it finishes launching will depend on how you have configured it, so it won't be exactly what I see, but there will be some words of encouragement and then the prompt, where you will type things:
    Last login: Tue Mar 20 14:06:01 on ttyp1
    Welcome to Darwin!
    -bash:~francine$
    The "$" is where you start typing, or you can copy and paste things in also. You would then type:
    sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/YOURDRIVENAME/
    You must make sure everything you type is exactly as given, thus you may want to simply copy and paste this:
    sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/
    and, making sure there is no space after that final "/" character, type the name of your drive exactly as it appears in Finder. If the name has any spaces in it be sure to surround it with quotes:
    sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/"MY FAT DRIVE"/
    Then hit the Return key. You will be asked for your admin password, and given a little lecture (this is only delivered the first time you use a sudo command). The password you type is not echoed to the screen in anyway whatsoever, so type very carefully and when you finish hit the Return key again. You'll then get the notice that indexing is enabled. Type the word exit, hit Return, and then quit Terminal.
    Francine
    Francine
    Schwieder

  • Spotlight not Indexing (or showing any results)

    Spotlight isn't working at all for me in Leopard. I had just done a format and clean install of Leopard, all apps and fully updated OS and apps patches. It's been 2 days now so I'd expect Spotlight would have indexed everything. However Spotlight returns no results for anything typed in the search box. Nothing.
    Could the following be related? When I open Spotlight preferences>privacy and try to add ANY of my drives to the prevent list, it returns this error for all drives: "Privacy List Error. the item couldn't be added or removed because of an unknown error."

    I fixed it and want to post what worked for anyone else with this problem. Spotlight would not return ANY result after the clean Leopard install. I cleaned out ALL the caches with the program Cocktail Leopard edition. That did the trick. Instantly Spotlight began indexing my drives. While I've used Cocktail for years I also found a program called "MainMenu" which has an actual button for "Re-index Spotlight". I didn't need it because Cocktail worked. But should cocktail not work for you I would try MainMenu next.

  • How to know when spotlight is indexing

    hi,
    in previous OS versions you could tell when spotlight is indexing by clicking the spotlight icon in the toolbar and the dropdown would tell you.  now in yosemite how can we tell when spotlight is indexing?  because i use mail.app a lot and search won't work properly until the indexing is done.  thanks!
    rc

    Same way.
    Re-index Spotlight: Spotlight: How to re-index folders or volumes - Apple Support
    If that doesn't work, force it with this command in Terminal:
    sudo mdutil -E /

  • Spotlight keeps indexing in snow leopard

    Spotlight keeps indexing for the last 2 weeks. I tsometimes has 45 mins till finishing, but when I check later, it still indexing without a estimate of time when it will finish.  I have selected my ext. HD not to be index, but it still states it indexing my main HD.  What can I do? I'm using 10.6.8. Also have 4 USB, 2 tb ext HD attachded. 2-to a usb hub and 2 -to the back of the imac. What can I do?
    Austin

    I had the same problems with spotlight that kept indexing. I solved them by using the following commands in the Terminal:
    $ sudo rm -rf /.Spotlight-V100/*
    $ sudo mdutil -i on -E /
    As explained here:
    http://guidovanoorschot.nl/how-to-fix-spotlight-when-it-keeps-indexing-n-mac-os- x-lion/

Maybe you are looking for