You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!
When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.
When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.
My indexing stopped a week ago. I went to System Preferences > Spotlight, added and removed hard drive/s from Privacy.
When I look at the indexing (typing into Spotlight Search area), it says 'Indexing...' and the process bar is full throbbing blue. It's been that way for over 30 hours.
I looked in Activity Monitor > I found a few a few mdworkers under Process Name (_spotlight under User), with different % CPU values.
How do I know if it's even working?
Update -- in case this helps anyone else.
At the same my Spotlight/indexing issue began, I also noticed I wasn't able to shut down/restart my system. Thought perhaps these may be connected and worked on finding a solution for solving shut down/restart issue first.
Found this site https://appletoolbox.com/mac-will-not-shut-fix/ that mentioned the sudo mdutil -E command with some additional commands. It resolved the shut down/restart issue, and turns out it also fixed my spotlight issue!
In Terminal, I entered the below:
After I rebooting, I could see the mdworkers working away at high CPU percentages in Activity Monitor. I let it sit overnight and now all good.
Update -- in case this helps anyone else.
At the same my Spotlight/indexing issue began, I also noticed I wasn't able to shut down/restart my system. Thought perhaps these may be connected and worked on finding a solution for solving shut down/restart issue first.
Found this site https://appletoolbox.com/mac-will-not-shut-fix/ that mentioned the sudo mdutil -E command with some additional commands. It resolved the shut down/restart issue, and turns out it also fixed my spotlight issue!
In Terminal, I entered the below:
After I rebooting, I could see the mdworkers working away at high CPU percentages in Activity Monitor. I let it sit overnight and now all good.
It must be failing for some reason.
Safe Boot, (holding Shift key down at startup), does the problem occur in Safe Mode? Could take 10 minutes.
Safe mode attempts to repair Disks & clears lots of caches & loads safe Drivers, & prevents loading of 3rd party extensions, so if Safe Mode works try again in regular boot.
Open Terminal and run each of these...
sudo mdutil -E /
This basically asks for temporary super user status, which is why Terminal may ask you for your password (it may not if you’ve used a sudo command recently or are already logged in as a super user or root. The command asks the unix tool mdutil to reindex the spotlight database for everything on the computer, including external drives, mounted disk images, etc. To re-index only for a specific drive, use the /Volumes path. For example, for an external drive named “MiniMe,” the command would look like this:
sudo mdutil -i on /
Rebuilding a drive index can take a long time, so be prepared to wait whether you do it through the System Preference panel or the command line. A few minutes normally.
Thanks BDAqua,
I want all drives (everything) to index.
So I would do sudo mdutil -E / and then password if needed and then sudo mdutil -i on /
And then how can I tell if it's working/indexing again? Where do I look?
Spotlight Indexing
