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why is spotlight indexing endlessly?

For days now, I haven't been able to search for anything using spotlight because I get the message, "Spotlight will be available as soon as the contents of your have been indexed. Estimated indexing time" ................. . It gives me nothing. Just works and works seemingly endlessly doing seemingly nothing.


Help?

iMac, Mac OS X (10.5.8)

Posted on Jun 16, 2011 10:00 PM

Reply
2 replies

Jun 17, 2011 1:09 AM in response to lydgia

Greetings,


Are you running BootCamp or do you have any non-Macformated drives attached? http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3640


If that is not the case something may have gone wrong in the indexing process and it is not finishing.


  1. SafeBoot: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1455
  2. Restart as normal
  3. Reindex: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2409
  4. Leave the computer on and allow it to complete. Keep in mind that the more files you have on the system, the longer this will take so it may need to run overnight.


Hope that helps.

Feb 28, 2014 2:41 AM in response to lydgia




Please do the follwoing:

sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.index.plist

sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.scan.plist

sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.spindump.plist


<reboot>


sudo launchctl list

This fixed my new mavericks macbook pro from this same issue.

why is spotlight indexing endlessly?

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