I like the new Spotlight, I even threw out Quicksilver. The trouble is that Spotlight has just died on me. The icon is still there but it does nothing. Does anybody know how to restart it without restarting the whole OS?
Never having experienced what you've described, I have trouble picturing it. DO you mean that if you click on the magnifying glass, NOTHING happens? Or you get no search results?
Here's a little trick to get spotlight to re-index. Go to system preferences | spotlight, drag your hard drive into the list of "items to ignore" then drag it out. It will re-index and hopefully work from then on.
I am having what I think is a similar problem - all of a sudden (today) Spotlight decided it no longer wants to function. I can activate the Spotlight window, but no matter what I type, there are no results. The little "activity wheel" doesn't even spin (usually appears at the left of the spotlight window while it's searching). The same thing happens when I try to search in the finder: nothing.
i've searched for files that I know are there, are in accessible directories, not in system directories, etc. No files, no address book contact, no email messages, nothing. zero results and apparently zero activity.
I've tried adding my hard drive to the "private, do not index" tab of Spotlight preferences and then removing it as Apple suggested in 10.4, but this didn't have any effect. Repaired permissions, no effect.
It's amazing how you don't realize how much you rely on something until it stops working...
I have the same problem. Spotlight doesn't find anything.
Yesterday everything worked fine. I tried reinstalling but with no result.
Also trying sudo "mdutil -i on /" responds with "Indexing and searching disabled"
I'm having a similar to that decribed above, except it appears to affect mail search as well. After about four letters of a search typed in it freezes and then mail quits. Spotlight is similar, freezing and quiting after a search request is started.
same problems here. all of a sudden spotlight quit its job. it doesn´t find any contacts, calendar entries, emails ... it looks like it transformed to "quicksilver". 😉
It did happen to me too.
The workaround for this is to go to the spotlight preference. In the privacy section, drag your hard drive, wait for some seconds and remove it. The spotlight engine will start indexing again.
thanks for the suggestion, but as I mentioned above, this doesn't work. Also simply stopping and restarting Spotlight via Terminal commands returned the result "indexing failed".
So for myself (and defacto everyone else in this thread with the "sleeping spotlight" issue), I decided to go hunt Google and see what I could find. So...
I was able to solve the problem with the following steps (this worked for me - no guarantee it will work for you... see my disclaimer at the end of all this):
1) Take hard drive OUT of Privacy panel (if you've put it in there)
2) open terminal and turn off spotlight indexing for boot volume with the command
sudo mdutil -i off /
3) Then I tried deleting the .Spotlight-v100 file in terminal using the sudo rm commands and despite getting a "confirmation" (terminal isn't very "confirmation friendly") the file wasn't deleted. So - i used terminal to turn ON showing ALL files in the Finder to see if it was really deleted or not.
Then I restarted the Finder (by holding down the Option key and click-holding the Finder's icon in the dock and selecting "Restart" from the contextual menu. Finder disappears, reloads and your desktop is back.)
4) I opened my hard drive icon and there was the .Spotlight-V100 file and a few others that I deleted from the root level of my drive:
.Spotlight-V100
mds-crash-state (note - this file may mean you have corrupt files - run a viable drive repair utility on your disk soon if you see this file)
and a file named something like "never_index" (I can't recall the exact name, but it's a file added when you add your drive to the Privacy tab on Spotlight preference panel and is in the same directory as the .Spotlight-V100 file, which should be the root of your hard drive.. it's pretty obvious when/if you see it -- for some reason, this never deleted and was preventing spotlight from indexing my drive..)
BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU DELETE BEYOND THIS - Whimsically throwing files into your trash to watch them disappear can result in lobotomizing your Mac.
5) I then turned back off the Show All Items option for Finder so I didn't have to look at all those extra ugly files I'm not supposed to be looking at under normal circumstances, thereby minimizing the chance that I might lobotomize my PowerBook:
defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles NO
6) Another finder restart
7) Turned back on spotlight indexing in Terminal:
sudo mdutil -i on /
and presto, Spotlight instantly started reindexing my drive and has worked for the past 6 days since I did this.
** Please note - This worked for me and I did this on my own mac for my own benefit and was willing to risk having to (at worse) reformat my drive if I really screwed something up because all of my data is BACKED UP - I'm not an expert but I did my research first with a handy online tool called "Google" -- if you're not familiar with Terminal and screw something up, it's your own fault for playing around before knowing what you're doing. I don't guarantee it will work for you ** =)
I had the same issue, Spotlight appeared to be there, but searches always came back empty.
I found that all I had to do was
cd / (move to the top)
ls -a (see what is there including hidden files)
sudo mdutil -i off / (turn spotlight off)
sudo rm -r .Spotlight-V100 (delete the old index)
sudo rm .metadata
neverindex (delete the never index file)
sudo mdutil -i on / (turn spotlight back on)
and in a few seconds, Spotlight started indexing again
Finder force quits, logout, restart and such not required
and a file named something like "never_index" (I can't recall the exact name
This is what did it for me. I found a hidden file named
METAneverindex (or similar). Deleted this and switched spotlight on using +mdutil -i on+ for each of my volumes and, voila, it seems to be indexing them now or, rather, it doesn't complain in Terminal when asked to do so.
I've had this exact same issue... icon is still there, turns blue, but the menu doesn't drop down .... found that a quick 'killall Dock' does the trick for this issue (from Terminal).
