spotlight indexing not working

Question

spotlight indexing not working

I'm running Mojave on a MBP early 2015.

Spotlight has stopped working on my internal drive and 3 USB drives.

I've tried using the Spotlight Privacy tab tricks in System Preferences and, when that didn't work, the terminal 'sudo mdutils -E' approach.

The Terminal response is

    Error: unknown indexing state

Not sure what to do. I've searched for how to rebuild index from scratch or any other approach to restore to a known state and then proceed from there.

Any other ideas of what to try?

Posted on Feb 12, 2022 12:08 PM

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Answer 1

Mar 2, 2022 4:20 PM in response to BDAqua

no 3rd party drivers that I know of

Mojave 10.14.6

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Answer 2

Mar 4, 2022 12:47 PM in response to BDAqua

OMG, thank you!

I thought I had tried that... and also, that if you want to index a particular directory, that I was doing it correctly.

But now my indexing *is* working again Thanks again

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Answer 3

BDAqua

Level 10

250,259 points

Mar 4, 2022 3:15 PM in response to zaj-carlosman

Great to hear my friend, take care! :)

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Answer 4

BDAqua

Level 10

250,259 points

Apr 17, 2022 12:14 PM in response to besnik88

👍

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Answer 5

doncagen

Level 1

8 points

May 20, 2022 7:29 AM in response to besnik88

Besnik88 could you list for me the sequence of terminal text using my system info.

Beckys-MacBook-Air-2017:~ beckycagen$

This is very confusing for me.

Thank you.

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Answer 6

doncagen

Level 1

8 points

May 20, 2022 5:38 PM in response to besnik88

I am sorry, I do not know how to find the Spotlight index you listed: ( private/var/db/Spotlight-V100/Volumes/ ) I have used go to folder, it does not help, and of course search is not working either. I looked in the system folder but do not see it. It is not in the Spotlight folder that is in system folder. Thank you for your continued assistance. My disk is APFS, and presently I see no mds activity in Activity Monitor.

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Answer 7

doncagen

Level 1

8 points

May 20, 2022 7:14 PM in response to besnik88

Ok, more information if this helps. I went to Go to Folder, entered private/var/db, but cannot open the Spotlight folder, I get this error: "The folder “Spotlight” can’t be opened because you don’t have permission to see its contents." There is no arrow next to the folder so it may be empty.

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spotlight indexing not working

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