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Spotlight does not index mounted drives

Running 10.5.1
Spotlight has not indexed any of my mounted drives.

iMac 24" Al, Mac OS X (10.5.1)

Posted on Dec 31, 2007 1:46 PM

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Posted on Dec 31, 2007 2:45 PM

Are those HDs listed in System Preferences->Spotlight->Privacy tab? If so, select them and hit the minus sign. To ascertain the indexing status, launch the Terminal.app in /Applications/Utilities/, type in this command, hit the return key, enter your admin password when Password: pops up, and hit the return key:

sudo mdutil -s /Volumes/*

This will display either *Indexing enabled.* or *Indexing and searching disabled.* for each mounted volume.
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Question marked as Best reply

Dec 31, 2007 2:45 PM in response to Blademan007

Are those HDs listed in System Preferences->Spotlight->Privacy tab? If so, select them and hit the minus sign. To ascertain the indexing status, launch the Terminal.app in /Applications/Utilities/, type in this command, hit the return key, enter your admin password when Password: pops up, and hit the return key:

sudo mdutil -s /Volumes/*

This will display either *Indexing enabled.* or *Indexing and searching disabled.* for each mounted volume.

Dec 31, 2007 5:39 PM in response to baltwo

"
$ sudo mdutil -i /Volumes/media/
Error: unexpected indexing state (/Volumes/media/)
Usage: mdutil -pEsa -i (on|off) volume ...
Utility to manage Spotlight indexes.
-p Publish metadata.
-i (on|off) Turn indexing on or off.
-E Erase and rebuild index.
-s Print indexing status.
-a Apply command to all volumes.
-v Display verbose information.
"
"$ sudo mdutil -E -i -v /Volumes/media/*
Error: unexpected indexing state (-v)
Usage: mdutil -pEsa -i (on|off) volume ...
Utility to manage Spotlight indexes.
-p Publish metadata.
-i (on|off) Turn indexing on or off.
-E Erase and rebuild index.
-s Print indexing status.
-a Apply command to all volumes.
-v Display verbose information.
imac:~
"

Mar 11, 2008 4:35 AM in response to Blademan007

Did you ever get a solution to this problem? We tried the Terminal method and Spotlight did not index as well for us.

Our setup is 3 Macs using a OS X Server' drive for file sharing. OS X Server is 10.3.9 but the Macs were Tiger (10.4) until last week. Since we got a new iMac for one station, we decided to upgrade the other 2 stations to Leopard; we did not foot the Server upgrade to 10.5 for the file server station.

Now none of our stations return Spotlight search results when accessing the file server drive. As I stated, this is now going for over a week, so I know Spotlight has had the time to index, even after attempting the Terminal change.

Any further suggestions?

/

May 9, 2008 3:50 PM in response to baltwo

I have tried everything suggested here as well as the forums at apple.com.
I am getting errors in Terminal that my index does not exist. I have even tried going to the .spotlight-v100 folder and deleting the index files there. Spotlight would start indexing and afterwards still nothing.
I also tried using Cocktail and it reported a problem with the permission on mdutil so I chmod the permissions but... bupkis!
I am at the end of my rope here.

Spotlight does not index mounted drives

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