Spotlight won't work after clean install

I am having the same problems. Am I missing something here? I cannot perform any type of search with Spotlight. The only it does find is the Public folder. I have the same set up. Clearn install with 1 account, admin, enabled. Help?

In terminal:
mdutil -i on /

will turn on spotlight indexing. The magnifying glass will have a dot in it for quite some time while it is in the process of indexing

Hope this helps.

I tried that and I received this error message:

Last login: Thu Nov 1 12:42:32 on ttys000
txlbb:~ david$ mdutil -i on /
/:
Error: unable to perform operation. (-1)
No index.
txlbb:~ david$

----------------
How do I go about creating an index?

Technically, I have spotlight working, but not properly. It has an index of the attached RAID but it doesn't have anything for the boot drive. I can spotlight ical, and I pull "practically" out of a PDF buried 6 folders deep, but not iCal.app. On my MacBookPro, the first hit on that search is iCal.app.

And since it would be logical to ask, no, I don't have Privacy set to omit my boot disk.

And- why the heck doesn't Quicklook work with a list of Spotlight results?

Update! ok those commands do work. Indexing is enabled and is currently indexing. The thing I forgot to do was log on as su with the sudo command. Read below to enable it. Hopes this works for everyone.


Last login: Thu Nov 1 20:05:34 on ttys000
txlbb:~ david$ sudo su
sh-3.2# mdutil -i on /
/:
Indexing enabled.
sh-3.2#

aha! thanks.

did it say anywhere in documentation, etc, that spotlight defaults to unenabled on 10.5 server? i don't recall that.

I didn't see anywhere in the documentation saying that Spotlight was turned off by default. It makes me wonder what else is turned off by default. Wonder why it was turned off anyways.

I did:

su -
mdiutil -i on /

I do not understand why this has not been fixed. I checked and Spotlight was turned on in the System Preferences, and I only noticed the problem when I went to index my web sites. Had to use the command "sudo mdutil -i on /" to turn it on (Rick typed the command incorrectly)

Thanks so much for the solution. How will this come to the attention of Apple so it can be fixed?

I am having this same problem with a brand new iMac. (I have had nothing but problems with this expensive thing)! I tried the sudo mdutil -i on / command and it returned 'Could not set indexing status for volume'!

What else can I do!? Would re-installing Leopard help (or maybe reverting back ti Tiger).

Thanks,
Dan

I can't believe it , I've finally got Leopard on my brand new iMac, which was supposed to come with it pre-installed! A friend who has Leapord came over and saw my screen and icons and said, 'that doesn't look like Leopard, you should reinstall.' We did, and now everything works great (including printer, Bluetooth A2DP and Spotlight, which hadn't been working prior). Airport works, too, but it was working before thanks to the WPA fix. Somehow my Intel iMac, purchased in December from the San Francisco/Marina Mac Store, came with a faulty OS installation. I wasted soooo much time trying to fix it when I just needed to reinstall (w/o erasing my HD). Maybe this can help others having similar problems. Happy Mac-ing!

mrgrumpygills wrote:
I tried that and I received this error message:

Last login: Thu Nov 1 12:42:32 on ttys000
txlbb:~ david$ mdutil -i on /
/:
Error: unable to perform operation. (-1)
No index.
txlbb:~ david$

I am having the same problem. How did you get it fixed? It isn't clear from your later post.

Dominik Hoffmann

My version of this problem is that since I did a clean install, Spotlight won't index my external HD.

I tried the mdutil thing, with the additional -a (for all Volumes).

The response I got was:

sh-3.2# mdutil -i on -a
/Volumes/465GB:
Indexing and searching disabled.
/:
Indexing enabled.
/Volumes/465GB/Backups.backupdb:
Indexing and searching disabled.

I also tried using -E (for Erase and rebuild index): same result.

Can anyone shed light on this?