OS X :: Failed Installation - Finder & Spotlight No Longer Working
Aug 6, 2009
I got a new Macbook today, and installed the Mac OS X 10.5.6. It stalled so I shut down, and when I logged in again Finder and Spotlight doesn't work. Though my hard drive says is labelled Mac HD: Mac OS X 10.5.6 , I am continuously prompted that Spotlight closed unexpectedly. And when I try to reinstall the Mac OS X, the DVD no longer appears on the desktop and Finder too, cannot be opened for me to locate the DVD.
Since the latest upgrade of 10.9.3 my and other office computers have problems with searches using spotlight and Finder search on internal, external and networked volumes. This is a big roadblock to our office workflow. Reindexing doesn't fix the issue and we can see clearly that the files we are searching for are there.
I upgraded my MacBook Pro quad core 2.5 from Lion to Mavericks. Since then I get a LOT of beachballs when I'm using Finder. I repaired permissions, deleted com.apple.finder.plist (twice) and finally reinstalled Mavericks over the first one. Still painfully slow and lots of beachballs.
03/06/2014 18:10:13.994 launchservicesd[53]: Application App:"Finder" asn:0x0-1c01c pid:277 refs=8 @ 0x7fc8b870d950 tried to be brought forward, but isn't in fPermittedFrontApps ( ( "LSApplication:0x0-0xeb0eb pid=12980 "SecurityAgent"")), so denying. : LASSession.cp #1481 SetFrontApplication() q=LSSession 100005/0x186a5 queue [code]....
Info: MacBook Pro, OS X Mavericks (10.9.3), Quad core 2.5GHz
I have an application called AppFresh, which basically scans the apps I have for available updates, then it's supposed to update the ones that are available. However, every time I try to update an app, I get this response: "Download Successful. Installation failed (Bundle ID's don't match)." What does this mean, and how can I fix it? It'd be a handle little app if I could get it to work right.
I tried to upgrade my MacBook from 10.4 to 10.5 but the CD has a problem. The installation failed halfway through and now I can't remove it. I pnly get a blue screen and nothing else. I want to restore 10.4 but can't get the CD out to reboot with 10.4. I'm new to Mac, now on my PC
I got wiped out by a lightning strike to my cable, and had to re-install Leopard. The first three attempts failed. After about five minutes into the installation, I would get a pop up saying INSTALLATION FAILED, COULD NOT COPY. I took the disc out and noticed there were some small dirty, greasy looking spots that had somehow gotten onto it. It might have been dirty fingerprints, I dunno. So, if this happens to you, clean the install disc first, before looking for other troubles.
I was running Bootcamp with Windows Vista smoothly until I decided to install Parallels 4.0 on my Mac 10.5.8. After installing Parallels, it loaded my Bootcamp installation which sort of freaked me out and so I closed Parallels without doing too much. When I booted Vista today, I tried running games that requried Direct X or enhanced graphics and they are not working! These games used to work fine before I had installed Parallels! I even tried fixing the Bootcamp installation by repairing the drivers through the installation cd that came with Leopard, but I still get the same problem!
I went to install Windows XP via bootcamp as I no longer have a windows XP machine, but still need windows XP for a few things work related. The install failed, the CD I used was kinda scratched and it missed a few of the files during installation so I skipped them (usually not an issue as they were driver files and such). Well the installed failed and cannot complete. Now I'm stuck in a vicious loop where it wants to try and complete the install every time it boots. I'm using a non-apple keyboard, when I try to hold down what would be the equivalent of command+option+O+F it does nothing and either starts the windows installation all over or tries to continue and finish the current install. No matter what, no luck getting the windows disk to eject.
I have been given a 1.6 Dual G5 running 10.3. I tried to upgrade to 10.4, the first disc installed but crashed several times on disc 2. I had run DU previously to check there were no problem. Each restart took me back to disc 2 which failed to install. I then tried to install 10.5 (Leopard) booting directly from the disc, it started then crashed leaving a black screen with the following promt: local host:/root* (a hash not an asterisk!)
Anybody offer any suggestions as to what I should do?
For no apparent reason the command-space keyboard shortcut no longer works for opening Spotlight. I go into the preferences for Spotlight and it shows no keyboard shortcut, I make it command-space again, exit, and it still doesn't work. If I go back into the preferences, it is blank again. What is going on?
I am running OSX 10.9.3 on a 3GHz Intel Core 2 Duo iMac with 12GB RAM, and itunes 11.2.2 (3) 64 Bit. My itunes library is large (approx 1 TB) and contains mostly ripped CDs, vinyl and ripped DVDs and BluRays. I usually add media using the File/Add to Library command. This set up has been reliable for a couple of years at least.
At time of writing itunes will still happily add music files, but is no longer happy to add movie files. I get a message telling me that the disk which contains my itunes library (I use a 2TB external HD) cannot be written to or read from. Clearly this isn't true as I can write music files to it.
I tried disk repair in the disk utility and it tells me the drive is healthy. I thought maybe there is a maximum itunes library size. As a check I tried starting a completely new itunes library on a different external drive and the problem persists.
I have >500GB spare space on the drive containing my itunes library. All my drives are formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled) so should not suffer any file size limitation.
Finder and Spotlight on my 10.6.5 Macbook are no longer returning results. Even within folders, querying ".pdf", for example returns no hits. Smart-folders with 'file kind' parameters also remain empty. How do I fix this?I have tried to find an answer using the MR "search forums" function, but can't figure out how to correctly enter the query to give specific results, (for example, it just returns lots of threads with "results" rather than "no results".
When I first got my macbook 2 months ago I could command+space and open the spotlight dialog box and type say "i" and it would start displaying ical, iweb, you know everything that starts with I. Like it should. Somewhere down the line things got funky. Now I command +space, open the box, type the letter of the application i want or whatever and nothing is displayed in the finder window. However when I move my cursor to the actual magnifying glass in the corner after I typed the search, and click it, it will show the results. Or if I type what I want to find and then command space again it will show it. So what did I do wrong? I want it back the way it way) Just having to command + space twice, once to open the search box and then one more time after i enter the search string, is getting annoying. Or having to click on the magnifying glass after entering the search.
So my old 15" early 2006 Macbook Pro (1,1) no loger recognizes the primary display. I can use an external monitor just fine, but when I go into System Profiler, it's like my primary display disappeared. I reinstalled Snow Leopard, reset PRAM, NVRAM, repaired my permissions, tried to update my mac, but litterally nothing I have tried has worked.
It started when I tried to install both Windows 7 and Ubuntu. After completing the Windows 7 installation, I restarted my computer and it just hung on the Apple logo. I could feel the fans begining to spin really fast and it felt like my laptop was on fire. I restarted my computer, let it cool down, and it hung at the Apple logo again. I rebooted it a final time, and nothing. Black screen. No backlight or image...nothing.
I want to list the files (Canon images, file names of the form img_xxxx) stored on an external drive (named WINBACK), a partition on a USB HDD. What I did:
1. Clicked on drive WINBACK in Finder.
2. Typed img in spotlight search box - Finder window changed to the full spotlight window. Window shows <Search: 'This Mac' "WINBACK">
3. Changed 'Contents' to 'File Name' so top line of display showed < Search: 'This Mac' "WINBACK" | 'File Name' >.
4. Clicked + to give a search line.
5. On search line changed 'Kind' to 'Name', changed 'matches' to 'begins with' from the drop down lists and then typed 'img_' into the search box.
6. Clicked + to give another search line.
7. Changed 'Kind' to 'File extension', and typed 'jpg' into the search box.
8. This gave a list of files img_xxxx.jpg (obviously 0 < xxxx < 10,000).
As there appeared to be some duplicates I checked the paths of the files. Some were from "WINBACK" but most were from various locations on the internal drive.
It's not finding anything, not even files on the desktop. It's not indexing the drive. It's doing sweet eff-all, it's doing squat. I've restarted. Twice. MBP 17" C2D, 10.4.9 Spotlight is crucial to me for searching emails and PDFs.
Recently, i've been offered flash update, so I accepted and followed the process. It always ended at 5% with "This installation failed". I know, that is definitely an error message which says everything you need to fix it. Digging a little deeper, i found this: Flash Player Install Manager[447]: Unable to execute privileged task. Ok, so I started searching for users with similar issues. Every single advice was to do a permission repair which, apparently, didn't solve the issue.
So the next idea was to check if something is wrong with my user account. Creating a new account with admin privileges resulted in same install failure.Again, dead end. Unless using last resort which MUST work. Enabling direct root login and logging in finally allowed the package to install. Something must have changed inside Lion with last updates. The package still asks for password when run as normal user, so it has to have all the privileges needed. Another possibility I was thinking of was that the process drops privileges too soon(so that's Adobe's problem then).
My dictionary is synced to my spotlight, so when I type in a word, it defines it. But now it doesn't. It also loads only a few icons of the files I'm searching. I have MacBook. (2008)
i am a Mac user for years and I have some experience with troubleshooting and fixing/reinstalling Mac systems unfortunately I feel rather hopeless at the moment since I wasted hours and hours on trying to fix my 4months old iMac (the 27" edition).
Ok so first of all, the problems appeared after some Apple updates, (it was a few months since my last update), I installed the updates and restarted my system and suddenly finder was broken, it just freezes all the time and I can't seem to open it and browse through my files and when I force quit it just crashes again.
The only thing I can is use spotlight to browse for something (note that applications like iTunes and Photoshop work perfectly).
Feeling desperate in this situation I tried to reinstall my Mac, so I inserted my Mac Install discs and pressed the ALT key while booting. The disc appeared but when I press enter my iMac just freezes and doesn't do anything. I tried a PRAM reset at this moment but that didn't do it either. I even tried different versions of Mac installs but with the same result. In the end I even tried to run my Discwarrior boot disc but it also crashes. So I can't seem to boot anything except my messed up Snow Leopard install.
Note that I also tried booting from an external hard drive but with the same result.
At last I tried booting in single user mode and I used the "fsck -y" commando but that gave me some Disc Errors.
Ok lets get things clear, I want to format my Macintosh HD and peform a clean install, what should I do ?
I've been experiencing weird Spotlight mishaps lately. So I open spotlight and start typing, but nothing hapens, no search results appear. I have to close it and open again (like double click on it) and then all the results appear. Anyone hd the same problem and fixed it? it is so annoying
My Calculator in Spotlight doesn't work anymore... I think its batteries might be dead? When I type in things like "4+4" the search works fine, but it doesn't give any math results. I think it stopped around the time I installed 10.5.2 but it may have been broken before that, I can't remember exactly.
My MBP 17 (2.6 GHz, model 4.1) with 128 SSD isn't finding files which are definitely on my drive. Seem to only find files on the desktop, but not in sub folders for some reason. Any ideas why? Is it the SSD thats not indexing properly? How can I reset or fix this. Its becoming annoying
I've gone through some of the threads on here about this issue. I have tried adding my volume to privacy tab in spotlights preferences and removing it, but it wont even let me add it due to an error.
So I then tried command line indexing using sudo mdutil -E /, this just brings up the message in terminal no index.
I have tried everything to fix Spotlight search with no luck. I have deleted the index file in the root directory with out success. and tried several other ways of tring to re index my machine. As you can see from my screen shots. There is a file called Apps on the desktop. Yest when I search the desktop it cant find it.
I had tried to write several DVDs and CDs before, and they failed (it turned out to be that they were already used DVD-Rs), but the burn folders for them are still on the sidebar in Finder, as shown in the pictures below. It's not necessary, but I would like to get them off, so is there any way to do it?
I'm running 10.6.4 on an Intel 2.4Ghz MacBook with 2G RAM.
Time Machine & Spotlight have both stopped working. I back-up to an external HD which is fine, (checked with Disk utility and dragging and dropping stuff onto it).
I have tried to rebuild the Spotlight data by putting my HD in the 'privacy' and then removing it, but this hasn't worked. It just hangs on 'estimating time......'.
Time machine seems to go through the checking process ok but then can't write the data across to the external.I have reinstalled the system but it's just the same.
