I am running a 2010 or so iMac under Yosemite updated to most recent and also same OS X on my 2011 MacBook Pro.
There are frequently times Spotlight won't find files I know are there—files I can see in a finder window pulled up next to the spotlight window that spotlight isn't finding. This is true in Mail as well. So I wanted to re-index. In these forums, I found an answer to solve the problem that said to drag my hard drive icon into the Spotlight Privacy window in system preferences and then remove it. I did the first step, and now it is listed in the "Prevent Spotlight from searching…" list. However, when I try to remove it, it won't remove. When I click on the "–" I get an error pane that says the location cannot be added or removed due to an unknown error!
How do I get my main hard drive off the list so it can be re-indexed?
How can I force my Leopard to reindex my drives? My External drives seem to be indexed, but not my Internal Drive.
I checked spotlight preferances, and its not set up to be that way. I tried doing it the tiger way and that didnt work... is there like a command I can run in the terminal or something?
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A102 Safari/419.3). Ok, so lately it seems that spotlight is missing things, iCal events, address book entries, etc. So I'd like to force it to just reindex my internal hard drive, how can I accomplish this?
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.
The Spotlight process is using 95% of my CPU cycles and I cannot reboot or kill the process to stop it. This is a fresh install of Yosemite, in fact, I did this completely new install to fix Spotlight indexing problems, but all I did was fix the old one and uncover a new problem.
I installed Yosemite on a new 500Gb SSD, no migration from past installs whatsoever. It's fresh and clean and Spotlight finished its big index that it does upon install. But now, days later, the Spotlight process is still monopolizing my CPU. I have a Mid-2011 Mac mini, 2.7Ghz i7, it runs 2 of the 4 CPU processes to nearly maximum. What the **** is Spotlight doing? It's not indexing, I can look in Activity Monitor and see two mdworker processes but they are at 0.0% CPU utilization.
for fixing this runaway process? I am usually very good at fixing broken system processes but this one has me stumped.
Info: Mac mini, OS X Yosemite (10.10.1), 30" Cinema Display
I upgraded about a month ago from 10.6. I have since discovered that Spotlight will show up search results using a Western Digital external drive but no results when I use my Seagate Back Up Plus external drive, which is the main drive I use. How to get Spotlight to get to search the Seagate drive?
Info: iMac, OS X Yosemite (10.10.1), 21.5" Mid July 2011
After installing Yosemite on my iMac, Spotlight search results are minimal if at all (only contacts pop up)
I've adjusted Spotlight preferences by unchecking all search areas and rearranging the order of search preferences so documents, files and contacts are the only areas to search and still no luck.
I have recently upgraded to Yosemite but when I use Spotlight to search for a file spotlight does not search or include any files on my external hard drive. I have had one community member suggest to explicitly check the Spotlight index via command line. I tried to follow his instructions but my limited skills produced a zero. Unfortunately, he hasn't replied back for further instruction.
I can search fine with Spotlight but when I click the result the spotlight freezes - right in the middle of the screen..If I click a text file it does not open the text file after unfreezing..So basically spotlight is completely useless.
I have seen Spotlight. it is working fine as long as I use Latin characters. Since I work with Tibetan, I was used to search for Tibetan words across and within files. When updating to Yosemite, both Spotlight and Preview stopped working properly with Tibetan. I have checked with various friends and all have the same issue: Yosemite indexing and search methods have changed from Maverick to Yosemite.
letters of the alphabet are still indexed (like ཀ་ཁ་ག་ང་), but when they are combined (like རྒ་), spotlight is the blue, giving no answer. Again, this used to work very well before. I have tried reindexing, following Apple's suggestion (URL....), but no success. It seems to be related to the indexing method itself. This is a big issue as we are used to search with Finder—a feature that is normally powerful in OSX..Spotlight works well with simple letters...But no result with a simple stack (ར and ག on top of each other):
This is old news maybe by couple of months BUT still. I've just experienced this on my Core i7... Fast CPU still hog by the dam MDS spotlight process due to Firefox "Profile" folder.
I am trying to figure out how to do something using Spotlight and am not having any luck. Can you give me a hand? I would like to search my hard disks for all files that end in a certain file type (example: .jpg), and show the total size of them. If I type in jpg in Spotlight, it shows all the files. At the bottom, I can see where it says "more than 10,000 found" However, if I want to look at the file size of a single file, I have to right click it, and select Get Info. If I select View, Show View Options, Size is grayed out to where I cannot select it. So I cant sort the files by the largest files. How can I do all of this in Spotlight? I saw a few apps (Houdahspot, PathFinder) that seem to fit the bill, but I would prefer to do this natively in OSX, or at least find a free app. I shudder to think of spending $30-$40 just to sort files.
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.
I installed 10.5.6 yesterday, and now Spotlight keeps freezing / crashing (just Spotlight, everything else is fine). I can't see if it's related to 10.5.6 or not (I'm not techie enough).
I have gone to the "Private" tab under Spotlight preferences and dragged in my hard drive. The green "plus" sign lights up, but once I let go nothing ever gets added to the list. I've tried it with everything and nothing gets added.
I've gone to Terminal and typed "sudo mdutil -E /" plus my password. It returns: "Error, no index found for volume."
I've tried "sudo open /.Spotlight-V100" and it says the folder cannot be opened because I do not have sufficient access privileges. Does anyone know where to find this folder on my hard drive so I can get to it manually? I am hoping it might ask for my password once I'm there. As the administrator, does anyone know how to make the OS know that I do have sufficient privileges?
The things I have not done are use disk repair because I do not have a boot disk. I have not reinstalled because the OS came on my computer and I have no disks. I would think re-installing would do the trick, but there has to be something else going on that can be tweeked, wouldn't you think?
I installed SL 10a432. Transferred a lot of files to the share/dropbox. In swedish this is called: ~/Delad/Brevl�demapp/ which in English would translate to "~/Shared/Mailbox folder/" or something similar, it not related to emails, just the literal translation....
what should I write in spotlight to reach this folder? i have tried loads of combination but I cannot find this folder in spotlight but I can find the items in it...
if I write "dela" as in "Delad" it suggest "delat" like it would suggest share insted of shared when it in fact was called shared....
I have my spotlight set so only applications come up... but when I search for any program all these .jar files come up as applications. They are not applications and filed in the wrong folder. How do I make it so they do not show up? I've tried hiding my entire harddrive except for the App folder to show up but that means not being able to search anything.
Not sure whats changed, but now when I plug in my external drives. Spotlight (mds) spins for a good while then eventually hangs. I can't figure out what the problem is.
I have a MBP and I recently did a clean install up to Snow Leopard, and then added all of my movies and files about 150GBs onto my mac. And it was all working perfectly, but now for the past two days I have not been able to use Spotlight as it says it is indexing.
Any ideas why or how this might of happened? I have recently brought iDeFrag and did a quick online DeFrag after I installed windows 7 in boot camp.
I use spotlight alot for finding files and not having it is.
I've been having issues with spotlight index in SL 10.6.4. The issue is that I'm not able to use spotlight on any accounts. they are all admins and still same results when trying to search from anywhere (finder, top right corner of mac, or applications). now this install comes from an image use by the company I work for and it has been deployed on many macs successfully.
I've already tried rebuilding spotlight database by System Preferences---Spotlight----Privacy---Adding Macintosh HD/deleting (also tried re booting in between the process) Terminal---sudo mdutil -E / Terminal----sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist Already performed Disk Repair in Leopard and Single User Mode.
The last thing I would want to do is backup the users data and re install the OS but before I do I would like to something else.
How can I tell if it is still indexing and how long does it take ona clean and jerk install that wipes the HD ? I was experiencing VERY choppy genie efects and dock animations for about 2 hours after the install of Leopard.... oddly seems to come and go WTF
I went to search for "ColorSync" in Spotlight but it wasn't able to pull up the folder. It exists though @ Macintosh HD > Users > Chris > Library > ColorSync
Am I alone in having difficulties with this application? I cannot seem to locate any file when I use it. I type in part of the file name and rarely find what I want. If I try to use some part of a document's text, it is just the same. I am also finding difficulties in compressing files but have put this on another thread to avoid confusion I am using Tiger 10.5.5
Is there any Terminal commands that will do this? I use Spotlight all the time - to load documents to loading applications. However, I hate how it makes any DVD's in my drive spin up. I never search DVD's, so turning this off wouldn't be an issue.
