Comments on: Rebuilding Spotlight’s Index on OS X (Manually)

By: DAR

DAR — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 01:31:11 +0000

If you have problems with Spotlight and
you are using Little Snitch:
go to Littlre Snitch “Preferences” and press: “New Rule” and configure to “Allow Connections” -”Choose Application”-”System/Library/Spotlight” and then select – one by one – ALL “.mdimporter” files in this folder.

This will make your Spotlight work across any connected harddrive.

By: MacMedix

MacMedix — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 04:53:43 +0000

FOLLOW UP:
Now Spotlight is doing pretty well in the Finder… But it’s still not finding words in the message body of Mail unless I search “all Mailboxes” . However, it CAN find those same words in those same emails via a Finder Spotlight search.

So if I type “macworld” (no quotes) in the search bar of Mail, and set it to look in ‘Entire message” and All Mailboxes it finds plenty. Oddly enough, if I tell it to search just one folder/mailbox it finds nothing. If I do the same search for macworld in the same mailbox and Subject, it finds a bunch of messages that have macworld in the subject, and most of those also have macworld in the message body as well. So searching of Mail is still not working properly, and if I really want to find an email, I have to either search “All mailboxes” or leave the Mail program and search from the Finder. Wow, that’s lame.

By: MacMedix

MacMedix — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 19:40:30 +0000

I’ve been having spotlight problems. Mail only finds certain items, and the Finder only finds certain items. Really annoying. I’ve also had a problem where sometimes I can’t open the Spotlight pref pane. It tries to open, but gets stuck at “Loading Spotlight”. It does allow the window to be closed. Sometimes it will open though.

Last night I opened the Spotlight System pref pane, and said NOT to index my boot drive, closed/opened again, and subtracted my boot drive from the exclude list (leaving only the time machine drive). A quick look at the Spotlight menu (upper right of screen) showed that Spotlight was “Estimating time of indexing”. However, 8 hours later is was still claiming to be doing that. I don’t think so.

sudo mdimport -X
Says it can not import for me. It’s possible that I may have killed the mdutil process sometime in the past 3 weeks.

So today I did these 3:

sudo mdutil -i on /
rm -rf /.Spotlight*
sudo mdutil -E /

And Spotlight again CLAIMED is was preparing to index, just as it had all last night. But it still doesn’t look like it is really working.

So I rebooted the machine. Yup, I actually rebooted, which I don’t do much. Uptime was 17 days, and would have been far longer but I installed a security update that required a reboot.

Now the indexing appears to be really working, and the Spotlight window says it will be finished in 48 hours… No wait – 16 hours, uh – 2 hours, ok maybe a total of 4 hours.

Anyway – a reboot may be what you need to get this thing going as well as the terminal commands. I’m running Leopard OS X 10.5.6 on a 2.16 Ghz intel iMac.

By: Monte

Monte — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 15:56:18 +0000

I didn’t have anything blocking but, as Dan Z commented, this part of the article did:

sudo mdutil -i on /
rm -rf /.Spotlight*
sudo mdutil -E /

And that’s after trying lots of other suggestions/apps found on other sites. Thanks much!

By: Pope

Pope — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 22:01:49 +0000

Thank you for this! The TimeMachine on my server went down, and I’ve been freaking out trying to get it to work again. The server has a lot of important stuff on it, and I hated it not being backed up properly.

You’re a saint.

By: Dan Z

Dan Z — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 19:16:07 +0000

i had spent a while troubleshooting spotlight and finally this worked! changing the options within spotlight preferences had done nothing! i had to use the terminal as above, except my second command also required a preceding sudo as follows:

sudo mdutil -i on /
sudo rm -rf /.Spotlight*
sudo mdutil -E /

hope this helps others out there with the same problem. my leopard was installed as a generic image by my university as I used the mbpro only for the summer, and i hated how it never worked

By: Oliver Lu

Oliver Lu — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 13:20:50 +0000

Another way to do it semi-automatically is with “Maintenance”, an Automator Apple Script. (It also does other stuff, like repair permissions and clean out caches.)

It’s free and available through Apple (so presumably it’s safe):

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/automator/maintenance.html

By: Tim Gibbons

Tim Gibbons — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 18:53:12 +0000

You can force Spotlight to rebuild its database by adding the affected disk to the Spotlight Privacy exclusions in System Preferences, closing System Preferences, then removing it from the exclusion list. Spotlight will begin rebuilding the Spotlight database immediately. This may take a while!

By: David Livingstone

David Livingstone — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 10:43:45 +0000

Thanks also. Can’t remember BASH syntax, so this helped step through the process with a new Leopard Server X install. It’s now indexing and I can go to bed.

By: Mugur Baloiu

Mugur Baloiu — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 08:54:31 +0000

Thanks for the tip.
This was very helpful for my external hard drive on OSX Leopard. I had this issue – after the upgrade on Leopard, Spotlight was returning 0 results on a search to the external drive. It was so frustrating because it was perfectly working before Leopard.

I am glad I could turn indexing on for my volume with this command:
sudo mdutil -i on /